Paid $80 for a 'wholesale' listing service that was just public data

I bought into some fast cash course that promised exclusive wholesale listings for flippers in Phoenix but it was all just Zillow and Craigslist scrapes I could've found for free. Lost a full weekend and 80 bucks before I realized they were just reselling county records with a fancy interface. Anyone else get burned by a similar 'members only' data site?

3 comments

3 Comments

lindab4920d ago

Oh man, I remember reading something about this a while back in some consumer watchdog blog. They found that a ton of these "wholesale" data sites just scrape public property records and Zillow, then charge a monthly fee for it. The crazy part is that most county auditor websites let you pull the same owner and tax info for free, but people get tricked by the fancy dashboards and marketing. It's a real shame because 80 bucks could buy you a nice dinner or a decent set of tools for actual flipping work.

paigem4518d ago

Read a piece on The Verge last year about these data resellers and how they basically rebrand public info to make a quick buck. They said county records are one of the most commonly scraped sources because most folks don't know how easy they are to access on their own. Sounds like you fell for the same trick a lot of people do when they see a slick interface and assume it's valuable.

olivia_allen20d ago

So @lindab49 mentioned the county auditor sites and thats exactly where I finally found the same data after I got burned. It took me like 20 minutes on Maricopa Countys site to pull up all the tax info and owner names that "members only" service was charging $80 for. What gets me is how they slap a clean dashboard on public records and suddenly its a premium product. Did you ever try to get your money back from them or just cut your losses like I did?