Pre-Foreclosure Leads

What it means

The pre-foreclosure window varies by state — roughly 90 to 180 days between the notice of default and the trustee or sheriff's sale. Inside that window, the homeowner is motivated, the equity position is usually known (recorded loan balance vs. estimated value), and a cash close can stop the foreclosure.

Outside that window, the lead is dead: the property has either sold at auction, been refinanced, or reinstated. So both recency of the filing and recency of the contact info matter.

How Ava Data handles pre-foreclosure leads

Ava Data's per-match pricing pairs especially well with pre-foreclosure lists, where a meaningful share of records may already be reinstated or unreachable by the time you trace them — you only pay for the records that returned a working number, not for the dead ones.

In the dashboard, you can search a single homeowner before you call, or upload the week's full notice-of-default pull as a CSV and dial from the enriched export. Through the API, the same data flows into your existing dialer or CRM.

For developers: example API call

If you'd rather click than code, the Ava Data dashboard returns the same data without a single line of JSON. The snippet below is for teams wiring Ava Data into a CRM, dialer, or AI pipeline.

{
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "address": "123 Main St",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "returns": ["phone"]
}

{
  "matchFound": true,
  "creditsCharged": 1,
  "subject": {
    "phones": [{ "number": "5125551234", "type": "mobile", "lastSeen": "2026-05-10" }]
  }
}

Related terms

• Distressed Property Leads — Distressed property leads are owners of homes facing financial or physical distress — pre-foreclosure, tax-delinquent, code-violation, vacant, or inherited — and are the highest-converting segment for wholesalers and cash buyers.
• Tax-Delinquent Properties — Tax-delinquent properties are parcels whose owners have fallen behind on county property taxes — a public-record signal of financial distress and one of the highest-converting lead sources for cash buyers.
• Skip Tracing — Skip tracing is the process of locating a person's current contact information — phone numbers, email addresses, and known associates — by stitching together public records, utility data, and proprietary identity graphs.