PropStream Alternative for Houston Wholesalers: An Honest Comparison

If you flip or wholesale houses in Houston, you have probably looked at PropStream. Maybe you signed up for the free trial, watched a tutorial, and felt a little overwhelmed by how much there is. Or you tried it, liked it, and then winced at the $99 a month for a tool you only use to look at one city.

This post is an honest comparison of PropStream and MotivatedFinder for a Houston operator. We built MotivatedFinder, so we are obviously biased. We will try not to be unfair. PropStream is a strong product. For some operators it is the right choice. For Houston-only investors and wholesalers, it is usually overkill.

Here is how to think about which one fits your business.

What PropStream genuinely does well

PropStream is the gold-standard national lead-generation tool for a reason. They cover roughly 153 million properties across every county in the country. If you wholesale in three states, or you flip in two metros and a vacation market, or you are building a national virtual wholesaling operation, PropStream is built for you.

Specifically, three things PropStream does well that we want to call out:

Skip tracing built in. You can pull a list, filter it, and skip-trace it for phone numbers in the same session. The skip tracing costs extra per record, but the integrated workflow saves you from juggling three tools. MotivatedFinder does not yet have skip tracing. If your funnel relies on cold-calling owners and you do not already have a skip tracing subscription somewhere, that is a real PropStream win.

List builder with rich filters. Their list builder lets you stack filters across hundreds of fields: equity percentage, last sale year, mortgage balance, loan type, lien presence, owner age, ownership length, and so on. If you have a precise buy box that requires exotic filter combinations, PropStream gives you the dials.

Comps and ARV estimates. Inside PropStream you can pull recent comparable sales, run an after-repair value estimate, and dump it into a deal analysis worksheet without leaving the app. For a flipper or BRRRR operator who needs to underwrite a property in two minutes, that integrated comps workflow is a legitimate edge.

Where PropStream costs more than it should for a Houston operator

The version of PropStream most investors actually sign up for is $99 a month for roughly 10,000 monthly property lookups, plus skip tracing as a per-record add-on. There is a discounted annual plan and various enterprise tiers, but $99 a month is the baseline most Houston wholesalers pay.

For that price you get a tool calibrated for someone who works 50 markets. If you work one market, three things go wrong:

You pay for coverage you never use. A Houston wholesaler who never opens a property in Phoenix is paying for PropStream's Phoenix coverage anyway. The $99 supports the whole national database. The fair Houston-only share of that cost is somewhere between $5 and $15 a month, and you cannot buy a Houston-only SKU.

You build the same lists from scratch every time. PropStream gives you powerful filters. It does not give you pre-built distress scoring. If you want a Houston list of properties that are tax delinquent for two-plus years, in absentee ownership, with high equity, you build that list by manually stacking five or six filter rules. Then you do it again next month. The product treats you as a data analyst, not a wholesaler who wants results.

The Houston-specific signals are flattened. PropStream knows tax delinquency and equity from national records. They do not surface the Houston specifics: USPS vacancy on a parcel, lis pendens filed in the Harris County District Clerk system, probate filings in the Harris County Probate Court, code violations from the City of Houston. National tools cannot afford to integrate every county-level signal. A Houston-focused tool can.

What MotivatedFinder does differently for Houston

MotivatedFinder is built to do one thing well: find motivated sellers in Houston. Not Dallas, not Austin, not San Antonio. Just Houston. That focus changes how the product is shaped.

Every Houston parcel scored 1 to 10 out of the gate. When you log in, you do not build a list. You open a map of Harris County with every residential parcel color-coded by its distress score. The scoring engine reads tax delinquency, absentee ownership, equity percentage, USPS vacancy, and other Houston-specific signals out of free public records. Highest-scoring leads surface first. No filter stacking required.

Map-first instead of list-first. PropStream is fundamentally a search box and a results table. MotivatedFinder is fundamentally a map. If you wholesale Houston, you already think geographically: you know that this corner of the Northside has a different exit strategy than this block of Spring Branch. A map lets you draw, zoom, and prioritize the way you actually run your business.

$49 a month instead of $99. Half the price for a tool that is more useful for Houston work, because it is purpose-built for Houston. The free tier gives you 10 unlocked leads every month with owner name and mailing address, so you can see the product and the data before paying anything.

Honest about what we do not do yet. MotivatedFinder does not have skip tracing in the product. We do not have nationwide coverage. We do not have ARV comps yet. If your workflow needs any of those, PropStream is the better answer today. We are explicit about the gap because picking the wrong tool wastes your time and ours.

Side by side, the operator-level differences

Coverage: PropStream covers every county in the country. MotivatedFinder covers Harris County only, with Fort Bend and Montgomery planned. If you work outside Houston, the comparison ends here.

Pricing: PropStream is $99 a month for the standard plan plus per-record skip tracing. MotivatedFinder is $49 a month for the Pro tier and a free tier with 10 monthly unlocks.

Distress scoring: PropStream gives you raw fields and filters. MotivatedFinder gives you a precomputed 1 to 10 score on every parcel, with the contributing signals labeled. You can rank-order the highest-distress properties without building anything.

Interface: PropStream is a desktop-style list view with a small map. MotivatedFinder is a map view that pans and zooms like Google Maps, with a lead list collapsed into a side panel.

Skip tracing: PropStream has skip tracing integrated, priced per record. MotivatedFinder does not have skip tracing yet, so you would run an external service like BatchSkipTracing or REI Skip if you cold call.

List export: PropStream exports to CSV at every tier. MotivatedFinder exports to CSV on the Pro tier.

Who should pick which one

Stay on PropStream if: you operate in two or more markets, you depend on integrated skip tracing in a single tool, or your business model needs nationwide comps inside the same workflow as your list building. PropStream is genuinely better for those use cases and we are not going to talk you out of it.

Try MotivatedFinder if: you are a Houston-only wholesaler, flipper, or agent who wants Houston-specific distress signals scored and mapped out of the box. Cut your data spend in half, get to the leads faster, and use a tool built for the geography you already operate in. The free tier means you can validate the product with no card on file.

Use both if: your business is mostly Houston but you sometimes wholesale outside the area. Put MotivatedFinder on the Pro tier for your daily Houston work and keep PropStream around for the occasional out-of-market deal. The total is still less than $150 a month, and your daily workflow gets dramatically faster.

The math for a Houston-only operator

A typical Houston wholesaler closes between 6 and 24 deals a year, depending on whether wholesaling is full time or a side income. Per-deal margin runs $5,000 to $20,000. Annual data tooling cost on PropStream is roughly $1,188 ($99 times 12), plus skip tracing add-ons that vary by volume.

On MotivatedFinder Pro the same year is $588 ($49 times 12). That is a $600 annual saving on tooling, with no skip tracing surcharge because skip tracing runs through an external service either way. One closed deal still covers a decade of either subscription. The question is which tool finds you that deal faster.

For Houston, we think it is the one that already scores every Harris County parcel for you and shows them on a map.

The honest pitch

We are not trying to replace PropStream for everyone. We are trying to be the right tool for Houston. The free tier lets you check that without committing. Sign in, look at the 10 highest-distress parcels in your search area, and decide for yourself if a Houston-specific score on a Houston-specific map is more useful than a national filter-builder.

If you want to read the underlying methodology, our guide to finding motivated sellers in Houston using free HCAD data walks through the five signals MotivatedFinder scores and where each one comes from. That post is the long form of what the product automates.

Start free at motivatedfinder.com, or compare plans on the pricing page.