What are pre-probate leads from obituaries?

Watch every county in the state you buy in, and read the obituary the day it is posted. That is earlier than a weekly lead list, and earlier than a feed that arrives weeks later. Start with the investor overview or the Florida county feed.

How does a same-day obituary compare with a weekly list?

An obituary posted today is often the first public notice. Most ObituaryMonitor alerts arrive within hours to one day after that notice appears on a source we monitor. A weekly file and a three-week list describe something that has already circulated.

Weekly lead lists and feeds that arrive weeks later describe something that has already circulated. Keep the probate leads. They answer a later question.

What are the steps once a notice is posted?

Pick the state you actually buy in. One Daily County Intelligence subscription covers every county in that state for $249 a month. The trial is 5 days for one state. Credit card required. Try one state free for 5 days.

Open the obituary URL, note the county, and write down only the relatives the notice names. Then run the address question in the property tool you already use. Not every notice is a house. The later list is a backstop.

Where are obituaries published?

There is no single obituary site. Funeral homes publish on their own websites, newspapers still run paid notices, and large memorial sites copy a portion of both. ObituaryMonitor monitors 17,565+ funeral-home and newspaper sources. The map is in where obituaries are published, and the funeral home directory is the public index of those homes.

For a new researcher, start with how to find out if someone died. For a short notice versus a full obituary, see obituary vs death notice.

Why is there no central database of deaths and inherited homes?

The United States does not publish one live database of every death, and it does not publish one live database of every house that might pass to an heir. Vital records are slow and often restricted. Probate courts are county systems, and an estate may never be opened.

That is why pre-probate lists take weeks. They are assembled after someone matches a death to a property. An obituary does not do that matching for you. It tells you the death happened and, often, who the family is. Obituaries are not the same thing as a vital record.

What if you cannot find an obituary?

Some families never publish a notice. A missing obituary is not evidence the person is alive, and it is not evidence they owned property. If you already have a name, the Death Verification API returns not_proof_of_life on a not_found result. Pricing for that API is a sales conversation.

When the notice exists but a hand search misses it, the usual reasons are a funeral-home site, a short newspaper notice, or a delay of several days. Finding recent obituaries walks through those gaps. See also how to know if someone died without an obituary.

How do you get notified when a new obituary is posted?

For a market, notification means a state feed: new obituaries in every county, the day they are posted, with the family named when the obituary names them. Possible property matches are included in select states and are a research lead, not proof the person was the owner. Teams that want the feed in software can use the county feed API.

For one person you already know, name monitoring is a different product. See how to get notified when someone dies and obituary monitoring and alerts. If the next step is locating people rather than buying houses, read skip tracing.