Answers to common questions about Ugly House Finder, the AI platform that helps real estate investors find distressed and off-market properties at scale. If your question is not covered here, reach out and we will help.
What is Ugly House Finder?
Ugly House Finder is an AI platform that finds distressed residential properties at scale. It looks at a house the way an experienced investor would when driving a neighborhood, judging visible signs of neglect, except it does this across entire neighborhoods, counties, and states automatically instead of one street at a time. You get back a ranked, tiered list of the properties most likely to sell at a discount.
How does Ugly House Finder find distressed properties?
It runs vision AI over street-level and aerial imagery for every property in your target area, scoring each home against 10 visual distress indicators such as roof damage, overgrown yards, and boarded windows. It then layers in public records like tax status and ownership to build a distress score, and sorts every property into Hot, Warm, and Cold tiers so your best leads rise to the top.
Can I scan just a neighborhood, or do I have to do a whole county?
Both. In the self-serve platform you can target an individual neighborhood and get a ranked lead list for just that pocket, which is ideal for testing a market or working a specific farm area. When you want complete coverage, you can request a full county scan and receive the entire ranked list for that county.
What do the Hot, Warm, and Cold tiers mean?
The tiers tell you where to spend your time. Hot means strong visual distress backed by records evidence, these are the leads to call first. Warm means real signals with mixed evidence, worth qualifying. Cold is filtered out so you never waste outreach on it. You choose the cutoff that matches how aggressive you want to be.
What information comes with each lead?
Every lead includes the property address, owner name and mailing address, year built, estimated value, ownership pattern (such as absentee or LLC-owned), tax delinquency status and code violations where available, property photos, the distress score, and the tier. It is everything you need to qualify a lead and launch a mail or call campaign.
How is this different from driving for dollars or buying a records list?
Driving for dollars sees condition but covers only a few streets an afternoon. Records lists cover a whole market but are blind to what the house actually looks like, so everyone buys the same noisy list. Ugly House Finder sees the physical condition of every house at records-list scale, then ranks by real distress, so you get a list no one else has.
Where does Ugly House Finder work?
UHF covers tens of millions of properties across more than two dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Washington, and Ohio, plus all of California’s largest counties and major metros like Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and Phoenix. If your market is not live yet, we can usually add it on request.
What is Estate Watch?
Estate Watch is a weekly alert subscription for investors who focus on estate and inherited properties. Each week it scans local obituaries, matches newly deceased owners to their properties, and sends you a digest with the parcel, how long they owned it, estimated value and equity, surviving family, and a match-confidence rating. It surfaces motivated situations early, often well before they reach the MLS. Estate Watch is $495 per month for a three-county bundle.
What is Portfolio Watch?
Portfolio Watch monitors a list of properties you already care about and alerts you when an owner passes away. Instead of scanning a whole county, you hand us your tracked list (past leads, target streets, a farm area) and we watch it for you, so a change in owner status becomes an opportunity you hear about first. Portfolio Watch is $195 per month and covers a list of up to 1,000 properties.
Can I get a deeper workup on a single opportunity?
Yes. The Estate Opportunity Brief packages everything known about one property and owner situation into a single clean PDF you can act on or hand to a partner. It is a $95 per-lead add-on, useful when a standout lead deserves a full, ready-to-use profile.
Does Ugly House Finder estimate repair costs too?
Yes, through our Rehab Estimator. You upload photos of a property and get a tiered rehab estimate (cosmetic, mid, or full) with a one-page PDF, powered by the same vision AI. It helps you underwrite a deal fast once you have found a promising distressed property. It lives on its own site at rehab.uglyhousefinder.com.
Can I get owner phone numbers?
Mailing addresses come standard with every lead. Phone numbers are available through skip tracing as an add-on, and because you are only tracing the qualified, visually confirmed leads UHF surfaces, you spend that budget on owners actually worth contacting instead of a whole cold list.
How much does it cost?
You start with a free trial so you can judge the lead quality before committing. From there, a monthly self-serve subscription lets you run your own scans whenever you want, and when you need a large one-time pull, you can request a bulk scan through the County Scanner. The estate products are separate monthly subscriptions: Estate Watch at $495 and Portfolio Watch at $195.
How do I get started?
Start with a free trial and run your first scan. Pick a neighborhood or a county, let the AI score every property, and review your tiered lead list. If you focus on estates, add Estate Watch or Portfolio Watch so motivated situations come to you automatically every week.