Getting Started with Texas Signals: Your First 7 Days

You just signed up for Texas Signals. The dashboard is open, there are tens of thousands of property records in front of you, and you're wondering where to start. This guide walks you through your first seven days — one feature per day — so that by the end of the week, you'll know exactly how to find motivated sellers, identify distress clusters, and decide whether $29/mo is the best investment you've made in your real estate business.

Day 1: Understand the Intelligence Score

Open your dashboard and navigate to the Intelligence Score tab. This is the heart of Texas Signals — a proprietary 1-100 scoring system that ranks every property in our database by distress level. The higher the score, the more signals indicate a motivated seller.

The score combines multiple public record signals: pre-foreclosure filings, tax delinquency amounts and duration, active code violations, declining CAD appraised values, and equity spread. A property scoring 80+ has multiple overlapping distress indicators — these are the leads most likely to convert into deals. A score of 40-60 represents moderate distress, often a single signal like early-stage tax delinquency. Below 40, you're looking at properties with minimal public distress signals.

Spend Day 1 simply scrolling through the Intelligence Score tab. Sort by highest score first. Click into a few properties and look at which signals are contributing to their score. Notice the patterns: properties approaching auction dates, owners with years of unpaid taxes, parcels with multiple code violations stacking up. This is the lay of the land.

For a deeper explanation of how the scoring algorithm works, read our breakdown on how Intelligence Scoring finds hidden deals.

Day 2: Filter by Your Target Market

On Day 2, narrow your focus. Texas Signals covers 7 counties across the state's major metros — Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Fort Worth. Unless you're running a statewide operation, you probably work specific markets. Use the city and ZIP code filters to isolate your territory.

Start by selecting your primary city. Then drill into specific ZIP codes where you know the neighborhoods, the comps, and the buyer pool. Once you've filtered geographically, sort by equity. Equity is what makes a deal work — it's the spread between what's owed and what the property is worth. High-equity distressed properties are the sweet spot: the owner has room to sell below market and still walk away without owing money at closing.

Try different combinations. Filter to your city, sort by Intelligence Score, then toggle to sort by equity. You'll notice different properties rise to the top depending on your sorting strategy. Score-first surfaces the most motivated sellers. Equity-first surfaces the most profitable potential deals. Both approaches have merit depending on your investing strategy.

If you're a wholesaler, the wholesaler-specific guide explains how to pair these filters with skip tracing for maximum outreach efficiency.

Day 3: Explore the Map View

Numbers in a table tell part of the story. The Map View tells the rest. On Day 3, switch to the map and zoom into your target area. What you're looking for are distress clusters — geographic concentrations of high-scoring properties.

Distress clusters matter because they signal neighborhood-level trends that isolated data points miss. When you see 8-10 high-scoring properties within a few blocks of each other, you're looking at a micro-market under financial pressure. This could be a subdivision where an HOA is aggressively filing liens, a flood-prone area where insurance costs spiked, or a pocket where a major employer closed. Whatever the cause, clusters mean opportunity density — you can door-knock an entire block instead of driving across the city for one lead.

The Map View also helps you avoid bad neighborhoods for your strategy. If you're buying to renovate and retail, you want distressed properties in otherwise stable areas — a single red dot surrounded by green. If you're wholesaling to cash buyers who want rental yields, clusters in working-class neighborhoods with strong rent-to-price ratios are gold.

Pan around your metro. Zoom in and out. Get a feel for where distress concentrates. You'll develop geographic intuition that makes your deal-finding faster over time.

Day 4: Identify Active Cash Buyers

The Cash Buyers tab is your buyer rolodex. Every time a property in our tracked counties sells for cash — no mortgage recorded — we log the buyer entity, the purchase price, the date, and the property details. This creates a live database of active investors in your market.

Why does this matter? If you're wholesaling, you need buyers. Not theoretical buyers who say they're interested — proven buyers who have closed deals with cash in the last 30, 60, or 90 days. The Cash Buyers tab shows you exactly who is buying, what they're paying, and where they're buying.

Filter by your target ZIP codes and look at recent transactions. Note the entity names — many will be LLCs. Search for repeat buyers: an LLC that has purchased 3+ properties in the last quarter is an active investor who will buy again. These are your assignment buyers. Build your list from real transaction data, not from networking events where everyone claims to be a buyer but nobody closes.

Even if you're not wholesaling, the Cash Buyers tab reveals market activity. A surge in cash purchases in a specific ZIP code signals that sophisticated investors see value there. Follow the money.

Day 5: Track Pre-Foreclosures Heading to Auction

The Pre-Foreclosures tab contains every property with an active Notice of Default or Notice of Trustee's Sale filed with the county clerk. In Texas, foreclosure moves fast — 21 days from the Notice of Sale to the courthouse steps on the first Tuesday of the month. That compressed timeline creates urgency for both the homeowner and the investor.

On Day 5, open the Pre-Foreclosures tab and sort by auction date (soonest first). These are properties where the clock is ticking. The owner has limited options: reinstate the loan, sell before auction, negotiate a short sale, or lose the property. Your job is to present an option before that deadline hits.

Pay attention to the equity column. A pre-foreclosure with $80,000 in equity is a very different opportunity than one that's underwater. High-equity pre-foreclosures are wholesale gold — the owner can sell to you at a discount, pay off the mortgage, and still walk away with cash. That's a win for everyone.

Texas Signals tracks over 27,000 pre-foreclosure records across our coverage area, updated as new filings hit county records. The data refreshes daily, so new filings appear within 24-48 hours of being recorded.

Day 6: Discover New RE LLCs — Exclusive Data

This is where Texas Signals separates from every other data platform. The New RE LLCs tab tracks newly filed real estate LLCs with the Texas Secretary of State — data that no competitor provides. Why does this matter? Because a newly formed LLC with “Properties,” “Investments,” “Holdings,” or “Capital” in the name signals a new investor entering the market, an existing investor expanding, or a homeowner preparing to move a property into an entity for a specific reason.

New LLC filings give you a 30-day head start on deals that haven't hit any other platform. An investor who just formed “Westlake Capital Holdings LLC” is about to buy something. A homeowner who formed “Smith Family Properties LLC” may be preparing to sell a rental portfolio. These are signals that exist in public records but that nobody else is aggregating and presenting to you in a searchable format.

Browse the New RE LLCs tab and look at filing dates, registered agent names, and formation purposes. Cross-reference the registered agent addresses with your target market. If someone in your ZIP code just formed a real estate LLC, that's a potential buyer, seller, or competitor worth knowing about.

This exclusive dataset is one of the reasons Texas Signals exists. No other platform at any price point — not PropStream, not BatchLeads, not DealMachine — offers new LLC filing data filtered for real estate intent.

Day 7: Save Leads, Export, and Decide

You've spent six days exploring the platform. On Day 7, it's time to take action. Go back to the properties that caught your attention throughout the week — the high-scoring leads in your target ZIP codes with strong equity spreads. Save them to your leads list.

Once you've built a list, export it as a CSV. The export includes property address, owner name, mailing address, CAD value, estimated equity, Intelligence Score, and all associated distress signals. Take that CSV and run it through your skip tracing service of choice — BatchSkipTracing, REISkip, SkipGenie, or whatever you use. Now you have phone numbers and you can start making calls or sending mailers.

At this point, ask yourself one question: did you find leads this week that you would not have found through any other source? If you found high-scoring distressed properties in your market, identified active cash buyers, and discovered new LLC filings that signal upcoming deals — then $29/mo is paying for itself many times over. A single wholesale deal covers years of the subscription. A single off-market acquisition found through Intelligence Scoring can generate five or six figures in profit.

Texas Signals is built for investors who want data-driven deal finding without the $100+/mo price tags that platforms like PropStream charge. Seven counties of coverage, daily updates, exclusive LLC data, and a scoring algorithm that surfaces what matters — all for less than a single skip trace batch.

What Makes Texas Signals Different

Before you close this guide, here's a summary of what separates Texas Signals from the dozen other real estate data platforms competing for your subscription dollars:

• Intelligence Score — A proprietary 1-100 distress ranking that combines multiple signals into a single actionable metric. No other platform offers this specific composite scoring approach.
• New RE LLC data — Exclusive. No competitor provides newly filed real estate LLC data filtered for investment intent. This gives you a 30-day head start on market activity.
• $29/mo pricing — Full access to all data, all counties, all features. No tiered pricing, no per-record charges, no upsells. One price, everything included.
• 7-county coverage — Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and surrounding counties. All major Texas metros in one platform.
• Daily updates — New filings appear within 24-48 hours of hitting county records. You're not working with stale monthly data dumps.

Start Your Free Trial

If you haven't signed up yet, the 7-day free trial gives you full access to everything described in this guide — no credit card required to explore, cancel anytime during the trial period. Follow this day-by-day framework and you'll know within a week whether Texas Signals belongs in your deal-finding stack.

Already on the trial? Bookmark this page and work through one section per day. By Day 7, you'll have a system for finding motivated sellers that most investors in your market don't even know exists.