Pre-Foreclosure Leads

What it means

Pre-foreclosure starts the moment a mortgage default becomes public record. After roughly 90 days of missed payments, the lender records a Notice of Default (in non-judicial states, where a deed of trust lets the trustee sell without a lawsuit) or files a Lis Pendens (in judicial states, where foreclosure runs through the courts). That recording opens a window that typically lasts 90 to 180 days in non-judicial states — and often far longer in judicial ones, where court calendars can stretch the process past a year.

Inside the window, the homeowner still holds every option: reinstate by catching up the missed payments, refinance if credit allows, sell — the option an investor's call represents — or negotiate a short sale if the loan exceeds the value. After years of price appreciation, many defaulting owners have six figures of equity at stake, which changes the conversation entirely: a pre-auction sale protects money the auction would grind away in fees and below-market bids. Outside the window, the lead is dead — sold at auction, refinanced, or reinstated. So both recency of the filing and recency of the contact info matter.

Who you're calling shapes the outreach. Default usually follows a shock — job loss, medical bills, divorce, a death in the family. By the time the notice records, the owner is screening unknown numbers and their mailbox is filling with letters from every investor who pulled the same filing. The operators who convert are the ones who reach the owner earliest, on a number that actually rings, with a tone that acknowledges the situation instead of circling it.

The working cadence: pull new filings weekly from the recorder or a list provider → sort by auction date and estimated equity (recorded loan balance vs. estimated value) → skip trace immediately, while the filing is days old → run a respectful phone-and-mail sequence → re-trace non-connects before each follow-up wave → retire records once the property sells, reinstates, or hits the courthouse steps.

How Ava Data handles pre-foreclosure leads

Ava Data handles the trace step both ways you'd want it. List Builder includes a preforeclosure quick-list — build the segment by state, county, city, or ZIP with equity filters layered on — or upload the week's notice-of-default pull as a CSV, map the columns on screen, and let the bulk job run in the background. Per-match pricing fits this list unusually well: a meaningful share of records reinstate or go dark before you reach them, and you pay only for the rows that return a match — 1 credit (2¢) for a phone, 2 credits (4¢) for phone + email.

For the highest-equity records, a Deep Search (10 credits, 20¢) adds the spouse, relatives, and associates — often the difference on a household where the person on the deed has stopped answering entirely. And because the identity graph refreshes every 24 hours, the re-trace before your second outreach wave reflects this week's numbers, not the ones every competitor already dialed. Results export with up to 35 columns of your choosing, or flow into Follow Up Boss and your dialer through the API.

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",
  "dataTypes": ["phone"]
}

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "matchFound": true,
    "creditsCharged": 1,
    "phones": [{ "number": "5125551234", "type": "mobile" }]
  }
}

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.