Most VAs can pull a spreadsheet. Few can walk into a county clerk's office (virtually) and come out with the deceased owner's heir, their phone number, and a verified lien history — before your competitor even finds the address.
That's what I do. For the last two years I've built the backend research operation for U.S. real estate investors chasing the leads other people give up on: probate, orphan probate, heir search, title search, tax delinquent, tax surplus, code violations, and pre-foreclosure.
A few things that separate me from a typical research VA:
• I don't just request public records — I know which portal, which form, and which county quirks turn a 3-week FOIA wait into a 3-day one (NextRequest, GovQA, JustFOIA, and a growing list of direct county systems).
• I built a self-serve phone-verification tool from scratch (Twilio Lookup API + Node.js) because manually checking numbers was slowing my team down — nobody asked me to, I just fixed it.
• I've documented multi-state county records systems so entire teams could stop re-researching the same counties over and over. That's the difference between a researcher and someone who builds infrastructure.
• I ran the daily QA and training for a VA research team at Snap Ignite — so I know what "analyst-ready data" actually means on the receiving end, not just the sending end.
If your pipeline is full of dead-end skip traces, stale FOIA requests, or messy CRM data nobody trusts, that's exactly the mess I like sorting out.
