The data was never the product
Every foreclosure lead that shows up in a paid platform began as a filing at a county courthouse: a lis pendens, a notice of default, a judicial sale order, a delinquent-tax judgment. These are public records. Anyone can read them, and in judicial states the sale calendars are published weeks in advance with case numbers, addresses, and judgment amounts.
What subscription platforms actually sell is the labor of collection — hundreds of county sources, normalized into one searchable database — plus enrichment layers like owner names, phone numbers, equity estimates, and marketing tools. That aggregation has real value. The question a solo investor should ask is whether it's worth $1,200–$4,800 a year for the two or three counties they actually farm.
Pre-foreclosure, trustee-sale, and tax-sale records are public documents; subscription platforms resell aggregation and enrichment, not access.
The market rate for distress data
Entry pricing across the major subscription lead platforms clusters in a narrow band: advertised plans generally start around $99 a month, mid-tier bundles land between $150 and $300, and specialty pre-foreclosure services reach $400 or more. Skip tracing and marketing tools are usually metered on top, and published prices shift year to year — but the shape of the market has been stable for a decade: a monthly retainer, sized for high-volume national users, billed whether you contact five hundred owners or five.
For a full-time wholesaler running dispositions across multiple metros, that retainer can absolutely earn its keep. For an investor who checks one county's sale calendar every Monday, the subscription is mostly paying for coverage that never gets opened.
