Why we built Scouq: a letter from the founder
I have wanted to invest in real estate for years. I spent time reading, taking courses, talking to investors. The more I learned, the more I believed that the analytical part of real estate investing was a solvable problem. Good data, well-organized, can tell you which deals are worth your time and which are not.
So I started looking for tools. And I ran into the wall that every serious investor hits.
The wall
The platforms built for consumers (Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com) are optimized for browsing, not analysis. They are beautiful. They are fast. They have a lot of listings. But they hide the public data that actually matters for investment decisions: the assessor records, the ownership history, the vacancy signals, the off-market leads. That data exists. It is public. They just do not surface it because they make money from agents, not investors.
The platforms built for professionals (CoStar, REIS, PropStream, Propwire) are expensive. CoStar starts at several hundred dollars per month for residential data. PropStream is cheaper but still $99/month to start, with an interface built for the 2010s. These platforms exist because professional investors were willing to pay for data access. But the pricing and the interface design signal that these tools were built for brokers and institutional buyers, not for the individual investor who wants to underwrite 20 leads on a Saturday afternoon.
And then there is the BiggerPockets universe: forums, calculators, a Facebook group energy. Great community. But the deal analysis tools are basic, and there is no connection between the community discussion and the actual property data.
None of these things are wrong, exactly. They are all doing what they were designed to do. What I wanted did not exist.
What I wanted
I wanted a tool that pulled public records automatically, scored deals against my buy box, surfaced motivated seller signals (vacancy, tax delinquency, probate filings, absentee ownership), let me run BRRRR and flip and wholesale math in a single view, and worked on my phone.
I wanted it to be free to try. Not free as a lead-gen trick before a hard upsell, but genuinely free: enough capability that a beginner can get real value without a credit card.
I wanted it to be honest about its limitations. The deal score is a filter, not a guarantee. The AI analysis is a starting point, not financial advice. I wanted a tool that helped me think better, not one that promised to replace thinking.
How we built it
I am a data engineer by background, not a real estate agent or a broker. That turned out to be exactly the right starting point for this problem.
The first decision was the data layer. I chose public county records as the foundation and wrote custom Rust connectors to ingest, normalize, and diff county data on a rolling basis. No data licenses. No MLS scraping. Pure public record.
The second decision was the interface. No framework, no build tool, no bundler. Static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It loads in under a second. It works on a phone. It runs as a PWA. The constraint forced clarity: every piece of the interface had to earn its presence.
The third decision was AI. Large language models are genuinely useful for the narrative part of deal analysis: summarizing signals, explaining the deal score reasoning, identifying issues I might have missed. I plugged in Groq (fast, cheap, open-weight models) behind a server-side proxy so the key never touches the client. The AI is a copilot, not the product.
Fifteen weeks from first commit to launch. The first version covers 10 counties. More are coming every week.
What we believe
We believe that the information advantage in real estate investing belongs to the people who do the work, not to the people who pay the most for software.
We believe that public data should be publicly accessible in a form that is actually useful, not buried in county portals that require you to know the right fields to query.
We believe that a free tier should be genuinely useful. Not crippled. Not a demo. Useful enough that you can find a good deal without spending a dollar.
We will charge for the things that cost us real money to provide: the off-market list feeds, the AI analysis at scale, the team features, the API. But the foundation is free because the data is public and the tools to use it should be too.
Who this is for
Scouq is for the investor who is serious enough to do their own analysis. Not the casual browser who might buy a house someday. Not the institutional buyer who has a research team. The individual or small team who is underwriting deals every week and needs better tools.
If that is you: welcome. Tell me what is missing. I read every piece of feedback. This is version one. The roadmap is long.
Miles Dirmann Founder, Scouq May 12, 2026