Go get your first county.
You’re in — thank you. Here’s the whole starting move, start to finish. No theory. By the end of this page you’ll know exactly how to put an entire Texas county’s property data in your inbox, usually for free, occasionally for about four dollars.
Step 1 — Pick the easy path or the cheap path
Texas has 254 counties, each with its own appraisal district (CAD). Two ways in:
The easy path: counties that just post the file
- Harris (HCAD) — hcad.org publishes free bulk downloads (the real_acct + owners flat files).
- Tarrant (TAD) — tad.org has a downloadable “Property Data — Full Set.”
- Collin (CollinCAD) — collincad.org offers direct data downloads.
No email, no waiting. Download the flat files and you’re holding the county.
The cheap path: one email
Every other CAD will fulfill a short public-information request — almost always $0–$4. Travis County (TCAD) gives ownership data freevia a request to [email protected]; GIS shapefiles are $4. Most districts list their open-records address on a “Public Information” page (Dallas: [email protected], Bexar: [email protected]).
Step 2 — The email that gets it
Cite the two statutes so they know you know, name your fields, offer to pay. Copy this:
Subject: Public Information Request — bulk appraisal/ownership data export Hello, Under the Texas Public Information Act and Tax Code §25.027, I'd like to request a bulk export of the appraisal roll / ownership file for [COUNTY] in any flat-file format you provide (CSV, pipe-delimited, or fixed-width). Fields of interest: parcel/account ID, owner name, situs (property) address, mailing address, legal description, land/improvement/market value, and property class. If the file is large, an SFTP or cloud-drive link works great. Please let me know any cost and the best way to remit payment. Thank you, [NAME]Step 3 — Know what you’re holding
When the file lands, you’ll have, per parcel: account ID, owner name, situs address, mailing address, legal description, market value, property class — hundreds of thousands of rows. It will look like an unusable mess of cryptic columns. That ugliness is the opportunity.
Step 4 — The first useful thing to do with it
Don’t boil the ocean. Do one high-value join: compare each owner’s mailing address to the situsaddress. When they don’t match, the owner doesn’t live there — an absentee owner. That single filter turns a raw government dump into a list investors pay for. From there: layer in values to find equity, add the distressed signals (foreclosure, probate, tax delinquency), put a clean interface on it. That’s the whole ladder.
Keep going
I’ll send the next playbooks to your inbox as I publish them. The data’s just sitting there. Most people won’t go get it. You will.