How a US Real Estate Investor Used Zillow Property + Owner Data to Identify Off-Market Deals

At a Glance

Client

US-based real estate investment firm (single-family + multi-family focus)

Geography

United States — focus on 12 priority metropolitan markets

Platforms Scraped

Zillow (property listings + owner information where publicly available)

Project Duration

5 weeks initial build, ongoing daily refresh

The Challenge

The client's investment firm specialized in off-market real estate acquisitions — properties not yet listed publicly, often distressed-sale opportunities or estate situations where the owner might consider a private sale. Their investment thesis was clear: the firms that identify potential sellers before they list publicly capture margin that competing investors don't.

The problem: identifying these properties required combining multiple data sources — property characteristics from listings, owner information from public records, and signals that a property might be a likely candidate for off-market acquisition (specific demographic patterns, ownership duration, equity position estimates).

Zillow had a meaningful share of this data publicly available across listings and adjacent public-record content, but it was distributed across millions of property pages. Manual research at scale was impossible.

The Approach

Actowiz Solutions built a Zillow data extraction pipeline focused on the investment firm's specific use case:

• Property data extraction — for properties in priority ZIP codes, capturing all available attributes (size, age, last sale price, estimated value, ownership duration)
• Owner information — where publicly displayed on Zillow's property records, capturing owner names with their official public-record source attribution
• Listing status tracking — flagging properties that recently listed, delisted, or had price reductions
• Geographic filtering — focused on the 12 priority metro markets the firm targeted
• Daily refresh — Zillow data updates frequently, and the client needed fresh data to act on opportunities first

The Solution Architecture

Zillow's data structure varies based on property type, geographic market, and what public records are available locally. The extraction pipeline handled this variation systematically, with quality checks to validate owner information against expected formats.

Output was delivered as a daily CSV with new properties matching the client's criteria, plus a Looker dashboard for ad-hoc analysis.

Results

• 800,000+ properties in priority ZIP codes captured with full available data
• 120,000+ properties flagged as matching the client's off-market criteria (ownership duration, characteristics, estimated equity)
• ~40 confirmed off-market acquisitions in the first 6 months attributable to data-surfaced opportunities
• Reduced deal sourcing time from weeks of manual research to days of data-driven outreach
• Competitive intelligence layer — the firm now had visibility into what other investors were acquiring publicly, informing their own market positioning

Why This Matters For You

If you're a real estate investor, broker, or PropTech platform, Zillow's public data is one of the largest property and owner intelligence sources accessible online. The firms structuring this data at scale are running off-market deal pipelines that competitors operating on MLS-only data simply can't match.

The same pattern works for Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, and similar US real estate platforms — each has different data depth and refresh patterns, and combined extraction creates a more complete picture than any single source.

Want to see what off-market property intelligence looks like for your priority markets? Request a Sample Analysis →

Actowiz Solutions builds real estate and property data extraction pipelines for real estate investors, PropTech platforms, brokerage technology, and property analytics products. Track Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, MLS-adjacent sources, and public records across US, Canadian, and Indian markets.