Identify data sources for your target market: county courthouse foreclosure filings (Notice of Default, Lis Pendens) published on county recorder websites; commercial aggregators such as ATTOM foreclosure data, RealtyTrac, or Auction.com APIs.
For ATTOM foreclosure data, query the foreclosure/detail or foreclosure/snapshot endpoints by geographic area (zip code, county FIPS code) to retrieve properties in pre-foreclosure, scheduled auction, or REO status.
Parse key fields: foreclosure stage (NOD/LIS, NTS/NFS, bank-owned), original loan amount, estimated opening bid, auction date, and auction location.
Monitor for status changes by storing the last-seen foreclosure stage and re-querying periodically; a property moving from auction-scheduled to bank-owned is a significant status change.
For courthouse auction tracking, some counties publish auction calendars as PDFs or HTML tables; scrape or parse these and normalize to your schema.
Cross-reference foreclosure properties against MLS active listings to identify any that are simultaneously listed for sale — a sign of a short sale or pre-foreclosure listing.
Known gotchas
Foreclosure data ages quickly; auction dates are rescheduled or cancelled frequently, and publishing a stale auction date to a consumer can create liability — always show data freshness dates.
NOD/Lis Pendens filings do not mean a property will actually be foreclosed; the borrower may cure the default — track through to final disposition before acting on early-stage filings.
Accessing and republishing courthouse records for commercial purposes may require a license or data use agreement with some counties; check local rules before building a consumer-facing foreclosure tracker.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp