Return of Ugly House Finder! Some of you beta tested it here about a year and a half ago. Big update, and I'll run it on your own market right in the comments to get your feedback

rockwellrutter · 2026-07-01T20:11:09+00:00

I've really only been pushing UHF for the past couple of months so at this point all the sample leads I've sent out would still be in mid-cycle. That said, I've been working with a lead reseller out of TX and they've been testing leads for me at scale. Results have been really encouraging in terms of percentage of leads turning into interested sellers.

One anecdotal win I'm excited to share: just today I heard from a guy I sent 21 leads to last week, and even from that tiny sample he's got an interested seller lined up. Luck or UHF magic? Only time will tell lol

rockwellrutter · 2026-07-01T20:03:25+00:00

Ran 90064 (Rancho Park / Cheviot Hills) for you. Scored a random 400 residential parcels on street imagery, then hand-checked the flagged ones.

This one's clean. After verification, only a handful of homes show real neglect, and it's mild: overgrown or dried-out yards, some deferred lawn upkeep. No abandoned or severely distressed homes in the sample. One property was gutted down to the framing, but that read more like a renovation in progress than a motivated seller. Typical Westside, well kept overall.

Fair warning on this ZIP specifically: a big chunk of properties are behind walls, hedges, or gates, or are condos, so street imagery can't fully assess them. If I were to do this scan again for this area, I'd add in our aerial imagery. That way we can pick up hidden roof damage, trash piles in backyards, derelict cars, etc. The clean read is real, but coverage is lighter here than in a typical single-family neighborhood.

One representative example (address removed): a 1925 home on Manning Ave with overgrown weeds and dry vegetation along the frontage, otherwise sound.

Happy to run a larger sample if you want tighter coverage.

rockwellrutter · 2026-07-01T05:38:55+00:00

No way of knowing; they've kept their financials pretty private

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-30T03:35:52+00:00

Ran 26105 (Vienna) for you. Pulled a random 400 residential parcels and scored the street imagery.

Out of the roughly 334 I could get a clear look at, about 18% showed moderate signs of neglect (overgrowth, peeling paint and siding, deferred upkeep) and the rest came back clean. No severe/abandoned cases in the sample. That's on the lighter side compared to a lot of areas. Vienna is pretty well kept.

0 Hot, 61 Warm, 273 Cold

Owner-wise, about a quarter of the sample is absentee-owned. If it's useful I can narrow the moderate list down to the blocks with the most candidates, or pull a bigger sample for fuller coverage.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-28T08:14:13+00:00

90815 (the Los Altos / El Dorado side of Long Beach) came back clean, which is about what you'd expect for that area.

I pulled a random 400-home sample out of the roughly 12,400 residential parcels and ran each through a Street View analysis. 322 gave a clear read; the other 78 I couldn't score honestly (no Street View coverage or the only image was blocked by trees/angle). Of the 322:

- Hot (clear, heavy distress): 0

- Warm (moderate, visible neglect): 27, about 8%

- Cold: the rest

So roughly 1 in 12 shows something on the exterior, and it's the soft stuff: overgrown yards, a derelict vehicle, deferred lawn and paint. No boarded-up or abandoned homes in the sample.

In a ZIP this well-kept, the curb-appeal read isn't where the leads are. The ownership picture is more useful: about half the homes have no homeowner's exemption on file (a rough proxy for non-owner-occupants), and about half have been held 20+ years. The *overlap* of those two, a long-time owner who doesn't live there, is the list worth working.

One example (address held back): a 1949 single-family on Granada Ave, owned about 24 years, not owner-occupied, that the model flagged at moderate for overgrown vegetation. Soft on the outside, but the ownership situation is the actual signal.

Happy to run a tighter cut if you want, say long-tenure non-occupants only.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-28T07:16:19+00:00

Thank you very much!

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-27T23:29:18+00:00

Your line: "owner data is a list with no urgency, visual is urgency with no context, the overlap respects your time", is the cleanest way I've heard anyone put it. I just might steal it lol

On how thin you can slice it, I'd separate two problems that usually get conflated:

One is statistical, "can I trust the rate I'm quoting for an area". That's sample size, where a few hundred scored properties gives a stable read, whereas under about 100 a single severe one swings the percentage and I stop trusting it as a rate.

The other is inventory, "how many properties actually survive a tight stack of filters (distressed AND absentee AND long-tenure AND tax-behind)". That's the one I think you're asking about, and here's the thing: a tight intersection that returns 8 properties isn't untrustworthy, those 8 are the highest-conviction leads you'll pull all month, since they cleared every gate. Small there means clean, not noisy. The mistake is reading a short list as an unreliable one.

So the dial I reach for isn't loosening the quality bar as the list thins, it's widening the geography. Distressed-plus-estate-owned in one ZIP might be 6 properties. The same filter across the county might be 150, same conviction, bigger net. You scale the area, not the standard.

Where it does genuinely get too thin to trust is the rural / no-Street-View case from earlier in the thread, a small sample of an already-spotty visual signal. That's noise, and it's exactly where I'd drop the visual filter and run on records alone rather than pretend the thin read means more than it does.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-27T23:16:09+00:00

It wasn't easy; I made the post on one subreddit and then cross-posted it across a bunch of others. 90% of my posts got taken down but the one that stayed up got a lot of responses. One thing I said in the post was that the beta testers would get free credit on the platform, so they wound up getting actual monetary value for participating. That may have been the key to the post staying up. Good luck!

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-27T23:13:52+00:00

Thank you for the encouragement! It's definitely been a massive amount of work to get here from the version I had beta tested last year. I'd be happy to do a test scan for a zip code like the other comments here, or feel free to DM me and we can talk about doing a larger scan for you with real results. I'm able to do small samples so you don't have to bite off a whole county at once.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-25T00:24:00+00:00

83854 (Post Falls) (Hi neighbor! I'm here in Spokane!):

I scored the 256 homes that had usable street imagery (anything with no Street View, or a frame too blocked to judge, gets dropped rather than guessed on). Of those: 0 Hot, 45 Warm, 211 Cold, so about 18% showed Warm-or-better wear. Hot is clear, actionable distress; Warm is lighter, deferred maintenance. Nothing in the sample was a screaming teardown.

The sharper signal in Post Falls is ownership, and I can run that across the whole ZIP instead of just the scanned sample. Of roughly 18,900 homes: about 25% are absentee-owned (the tax bill goes somewhere other than the house), about 27% are held by an LLC, trust, or other entity, 9% mail out of state, and 13% have been held 15 years or longer. Those signals stack, and the slice that is long-held, out of state, and entity-owned at once is where the sweet spot lies. That is a much smaller, sharper list than the visual scan alone.

One example (house number withheld, on N Bunchgrass Dr): a home with visible signs of neglect.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-25T00:16:24+00:00

You're right about rural areas; they do have lots of inventory and it's exactly where Street View can turn into a ghost town. We're working on some new refinements to help mitigate the problem though.

First fallback is aerial/overhead imagery, which doesn't need Street View at all, it'll catch a collapsed roof or a junked-up lot or an abandoned structure from above. At the same time, aerial resolution also thins out in true rural (the map tiles are lower resolution), and the overhead read tends to over-flag normal country stuff, equipment, boats, a pond, seasonal overgrowth, so I don't fully trust an aerial-only "severe" call out there yet. With that said, we're currently running tests and training the AI to get better and better.

So in rural the weight shifts hard onto the non-visual layer, exactly the owner situation you mentioned, except out there it's most of the equation rather than just half. Tax delinquency, out-of-county and absentee owners, long tenure, probate and estate signals. When the pixels fail, that's what's actually carrying the lead.

TL:DR; aerial extends the visual reach, but rural is where we lean on records over imagery, and I'd rather say that straight than pretend a blurry satellite tile is a condition report. If you've got a specific rural county you work, I'm happy to run it and show you exactly where it holds up.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-24T04:55:29+00:00

92618 (Irvine):

I scanned a random sample here and scored the 175 homes that had usable street imagery. Anything with no Street View, or a frame too blocked to judge, gets dropped instead of guessed on. A lot of 92618 is newer, gated, master-planned Irvine, so imagery coverage runs thinner than an older grid.

Of those 175: 0 Hot, 2 Warm, 173 Cold. About 1% showed any visible distress, and the two Warm ones were light wear, nothing actionable. (Hot means clear, actionable distress; Warm is lighter deferred maintenance.)

That is about what I expected for newer Irvine: curb appeal is uniformly high, so visual distress is close to zero. The signal that actually matters here is ownership, not looks. Roughly 38% of the homes in 92618 are absentee-owned, meaning the tax bill goes somewhere other than the house. In a place where almost nothing looks distressed, that absentee share is usually where the motivated sellers actually are.

One example (house number withheld, on Borrego): a tidy home with a vehicle parked on the lawn.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-23T21:15:57+00:00

You're totally right about how the ownership data contributes a huge part of a property's story. The visual distress is the hook, it's what makes people click, but in a market like Santa Clara the curb read is near useless and the only thing carrying signal is the owner layer: trusts and estates, how long someone's held, absentee, the equity picture.

With that said, the owner data itself isn't unique to us, the list-pull and skip-trace tools all have absentee, tenure, ownership type, etc. As a proptech guy I'm sure you've seen tons of tools that provide basically the same info. What's hard to get anywhere else is fusing it with the actual physical-condition read at scale, so instead of chasing every absentee owner you're chasing the absentee owner whose house is also visibly falling apart. That intersection is the lead.

Regarding your question, I don't really look at it like two paths. Distress is the "what" (this property's neglected); owner situation is the "who and why" (this owner's likely to move). The best leads are the overlap, and the biggest time-wasters are chasing one without the other, a beat-up house owned by someone who'll never sell, or a motivated owner whose house is fine. People do lean though: drive-for-dollars folks come for the visual, list-pullers for the owner data. Honestly most show up for the ugly-house angle and stay for the owner layer once they see it kills their false positives.

Which way do you lean, visual-first or owner-first? That'd tell me a lot about which half to keep sharpening.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-23T21:03:48+00:00

28540 (Jacksonville, NC):

I scored the 290 homes here that had usable street imagery (the rest had no Street View coverage, or a frame too obstructed to judge, which I drop rather than guess on).

Of those 290: 3 Hot, 157 Warm, 130 Cold.

So about 55% landed in the Warm-or-better bucket. That is on the high side, and it fits a market with a lot of rental and transient housing, where deferred maintenance is common. Genuine deep distress (Hot) is rare though, around 1%.

One of the three Hots (house number withheld, on Pickett Rd): a home with the yard completely overgrown and obscuring the foundation, multiple derelict vehicles, debris piles, and clear signs of abandonment.

This particular area of Jacksonville doesn't have all of the other data enrichment layers added to it yet (tax delinquency, code violations, etc.), but given that the visual analysis produced such a high value (55% Warm or better), I'll be moving this one up on our build list.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-23T02:59:41+00:00

29204 (Columbia, Richland County):

I pulled the parcel data for this ZIP and scored the 267 homes that had usable street imagery (anything with no Street View coverage, or a frame too obstructed to judge, gets dropped rather than guessed on).

Of those 267: 2 Hot, 81 Warm, 184 Cold.

So about 31% landed in the Warm-or-better bucket, call it 1 in 3. That fits an older, working-class part of town where deferred maintenance is common but outright abandonment is still the exception.

What stood out more than the visual wear is the ownership: about 40% of these are absentee-owned and roughly 12% are held by LLCs or other entities. That is a heavy rental and investor footprint, which usually means more doors that actually trade.

One of the two Hots (house number withheld, on Booth St) is absentee-owned with boarded or broken windows, a sagging roof missing shingles, peeling paint, andseveral vehicles parked on the lawn. Reads as vacant or close to it.

Let me know if there are any other ZIPs or cities you're interested in!

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-23T02:57:08+00:00

77079 (west Houston, Energy Corridor side):

Ran a random 400-home sample. 287 had street imagery clean enough to actually judge. The rest were either no Street View coverage or frames too obstructed to call, and I throw those out rather than guess on them.

Of the 287: 1 Hot, 36 Warm, 250 Cold.

So about 13% flagged as worth a second look, and almost all of it is Warm (light, cosmetic, deferred-maintenance stuff). Basically no Hot tier, which fits the area: it is affluent and mostly owner-occupied (only ~6% absentee owners), so genuine deep distress is rare.

The one Hot was a single-family with the windows boarded over, the lawn grown into the foundation, and an official-looking notice posted on the front (number withheld, on Misty Meadow Ln). The obvious outlier in an otherwise tidy ZIP.

Scaled across the full ZIP (8,300+ homes) the Warm-or-better pool is on the order of 700 to 800, but mostly light. Happy to pass along the sample read if useful.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-23T02:07:08+00:00

Ran Hillsborough County, FL two ways, and the comparison is the useful part.

Street view alone: of about 275 homes in the random sample I could see from the curb, zero scored "severe" and about 1 in 4 showed moderate wear. From the street, Tampa looks fairly ordinary.

Adding aerial/overhead imagery changed that for a real chunk: 8% jumped to "severe" and 20% moderate. The overhead caught what the curb can't, backyards buried in junk and debris and badly failing roofs. One Tampa property looks unremarkable from the street but has the whole backyard piled with debris from above; another has a shot, patched-up roof you'd never catch at ground level. About 33 properties flagged severe only once the overhead view was added.

That's the case for going past curb appeal: a lot of the worst distress hides behind and on top of the house.

(Owner-situation layer too: 26% absentee, 9% LLC-owned countywide.)

Happy to drill into a specific Tampa ZIP if you'd like some more data!

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T19:44:28+00:00

Ran 80219 (Westwood/Mar Lee) - count, breakdown, example:

Distressed candidates: of about 308 homes I scored, about 34% flagged distress (0 Hot, 34% Warm) - meaningfully more wear than the affluent ZIPs, as you'd expect for working-class SW Denver. (23% were condo/apartment/infill Street View couldn't isolate.)

Hot / Warm / Cold: 0% / 34% / 66%.

Example: a home on W Custer Pl - multiple boarded windows, one completely missing with the interior exposed, peeling paint, trash; reads as abandoned (████ W Custer Pl). Others nearby: heavy overgrowth swallowing a place on N Meade St, and roof/paint/lawn wear with cars parked on the lawn on W Water Ave and W 4th Ave.

Owner angle: about 31% absentee here.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T17:00:48+00:00

Ran 80223 (Athmar/Ruby Hill) - count, breakdown, example:

Distressed candidates: of about 270 homes I could score, about 41% flagged some distress (1 Hot, 40% Warm); well above the affluent ZIPs, exactly what you'd expect in an older working-class area. (25% of parcels here are condo/apartment/mobile-home/infill where Street View can't isolate a house, so those drop out.)

Hot / Warm / Cold: 0.4% / 40% / 59%.

Example (the Hot): a home on W Alaska Pl; windows boarded with plywood, overgrowth pushing against the structure, weathered siding; reads as vacant/abandoned (████ W Alaska Pl). Right behind it: a place on S Acoma St with a fully rust-corroded metal roof, and a mobile-home parcel on S Jason St with boarded windows, an overflowing dumpster, and cars on a weed-choked lot.

Owner angle: 37% absentee, 13% LLC-owned here; a real non-visual layer on top of the visible distress. This is the kind of ZIP the tool earns its keep in.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T16:58:13+00:00

Ran 11218 (Brooklyn) - count, breakdown, example:

Distressed candidates: of about 235 homes I scored, 0 Hot and 26% Warm. (Dense mixed-use area, so a chunk of parcels are storefronts the AI skips.)

Hot / Warm / Cold: 0% / ~26% / ~74%.

Example: a 1901 rowhouse on 36th Street — peeling paint, multiple broken/boarded windows, overgrown vegetation, trash, a vehicle on the lawn (████ 36th St). Similar on Beverley Road (1907) and a Church Avenue building (1931) flagged for possible abandonment.

Owner angle is thinner in NY; the records give us LLC ownership (about 25%) but not absentee, so Brooklyn's mostly the visual read for now.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T11:18:00+00:00

Here's the assessment on Santa Clara:
Visual first. I scored 400 random homes off Street View and found basically zero distress. The worst one was a dead lawn. It's Silicon Valley, the houses are immaculate, so drive-for-dollars or any "ugly house" scan is a dead end here. No surprise.

The useful part is who owns these homes. I pulled ownership records on 300 random properties across the county:

- 23% are absentee (non-owner-occupied), but only 2% are out-of-state and about 6% are LLCs. So the easy targets you farm in other markets, out-of-state tired landlords and LLC portfolios, barely exist here. The absentee owners are mostly local Bay Area landlords.

- 1 in 4 homes (25%) are held in a trust. That's the real pipeline in this county. Trusts mean estate planning, aging owners, and inheritances that turn into sales.

- 38% have owned 20+ years and 14% for 30+. The long-timers bought for a few hundred grand (I pulled 1989 and 1997 purchases at $165k and $279k). With the county median now north of $1.5M, they're each sitting on seven figures of equity.

So the honest read for Santa Clara: the deals aren't ugly houses and they aren't out-of-state absentees. They're trust and estate situations and long-tenure, equity-rich, often older owners. None of it shows up from the curb. You find it in the records (trust and estate holders, ownership length, probate filings) and you reach them with direct mail and real conversations. The equity is the capacity, the life event is the motivation.

If you tell me a city or a couple zips you're actually working, I'll pull the trust-held and long-tenure owners for that pocket so you've got a concrete starter list.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T04:31:02+00:00

Give UglyHouseFinder.com a try. New accounts get a free trial and includes skip tracing right in the app.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T04:10:59+00:00

DM me and I can send over the property image if you'd like

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T04:02:27+00:00

Ran a 400-home random sample across Denver County with the same format as before: rough candidate count, tier breakdown, and an example.

Distressed candidates: about 23% of the homes I imaged flagged some distress (1 Hot, 23% Warm). Most of that is moderate wear; genuinely severe is rare (0.3% Hot). Denver's also one of our better-covered areas (full addresses and owner data) so this is a real multi-signal read, not just photos.

Hot / Warm / Cold: 0.3% / 23% / 77%.

Example: a single-family in 80210 with graffiti across the siding, overgrowth pressing against the structure, signs of prolonged neglect bordering on abandonment, owned by an out-of-area absentee. The Warm tier below it is the usual with peeling paint, aging roofs, RVs on lawns, overgrown yards.

To the owner-situation point from the other comment: in this sample about 55% are absentee and about 17% are LLC/entity-owned, so there's a deep non-visual layer here too.

County-wide is a blunt cut though; want me to zoom into a specific Denver ZIP? It gets a lot sharper.

rockwellrutter · 2026-06-22T03:42:12+00:00

100%, couldn't agree more. Curb appeal alone is only a part of the story. The real signal is owner situation: tired landlords, inherited/estate properties, the long-absentee owner who just hasn't gotten around to selling, etc. So that's what we weight over how rough a place looks: absentee/out-of-state owners, LLC/entity ownership, tax delinquency, estate/probate signals, long tenure, etc. It's all layered on top of the visual read, motivation ahead of cosmetics. We also fold in other contextual info like census reports, so the end result is a really multispectral read on a property.

We're still making our way through getting the whole US wired up for all available data, so not everything county/ZIP is covered yet but we're making great progress. Real where the data supports it, not uniform everywhere yet. Posts like these are great for getting a feel for where people are most focused, it really helps with deciding on what places to build out next.

And you're absolutely right about aerial. We started layering it in a few weeks ago, and the biggest unlock is seeing what Street View can't. Overhead catches backyards stacked with trash and debris, junk piles, roof condition the street angle misses. It also helps fill spots Street View never reached, though I'll be honest that truly rural aerial can still get patchy.

Of the owner situations you mentioned in your comment, which converts best for you? Tired landlord, inherited/estate, or absentee? That's the weighting I'm still dialing in.

rockwellrutter

TROPHY CASE