How We Automated a Real Estate Investor's Deal Flow: 300+ Milwaukee Properties Screened Daily

Real estate investor spending 20+ hours monthly screening Zillow manually across Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Racine. Solution: n8n + Apify Zillow scraper + RentCast API + dual-scenario ROI filter. Results: 300+ properties weekly, 30x coverage, $1,356/month saved, $144/month cost.

n8n + Apify + RentCast automated real estate deal finder workflow delivering 300+ Milwaukee property screenings daily
30x deal coverage: Milwaukee real estate investor screens 300+ Zillow listings weekly with automated ROI filtering

The Problem

Dane invests in single-family and small multifamily properties across Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Racine. With hundreds of new Zillow listings hitting every week, manually running cash-on-cash calculations on each one was consuming entire afternoons. Deals that penciled out sat unreviewed because there was no bandwidth to evaluate them in time. In real estate, being the third person to call a motivated seller is rarely a winning position.

Results

  • 300+ properties screened weekly: Up from roughly 10 analyzed manually, a 30x increase in coverage with zero additional effort
  • 20 hours/month reclaimed: Time previously spent pulling comps, estimating rents, and running calculations by hand
  • Up to $1,356/month in time value recovered: Based on $75/hour opportunity cost applied to reclaimed hours
  • $144/month total system cost: Apify at $30, RentCast at $79, and API overhead at $35, a fraction of what the time was worth

Before vs After

Before: Dane spent 20+ hours monthly scrolling Zillow, manually pulling comps, estimating rents, and calculating returns on individual properties. Coverage was limited to what one person could physically review in a day.

After: A daily n8n workflow screens every new listing in three target markets, runs dual-scenario ROI calculations against real RentCast rent data, deduplicates against previously alerted properties, and delivers a formatted Gmail report of qualified deals each morning before he opens his laptop.

Formatted Gmail deal alert showing property address, Zillow link, dual-scenario cash-on-cash ROI, projected monthly cash flow, and RentCast comparable rent data
Formatted Gmail deal alert delivered each morning: property link, dual-scenario ROI, monthly cash flow, and RentCast rent comp data

Client Goal

Dane needed a way to evaluate every qualifying Milwaukee-area listing against a 12% cash-on-cash threshold, in both all-cash and financed scenarios, without spending his days buried in spreadsheets. The goal was deal flow coverage at scale, not optimization of a manual process.

Challenges

  • Volume vs. capacity: Hundreds of new listings weekly across three markets made exhaustive manual review impossible without missing deals or burning time that should go toward acquisitions
  • Rent estimation accuracy: Estimating market rent by feel introduces error that compounds through the ROI calculation. A $200/month rent miss changes the entire return profile of a property
  • Foreclosure noise: Bank-owned properties look attractive on list price alone but carry rehab complexity and legal overhead that destroys the projected return; filtering them before the calculation stage was critical
  • Repeat alert fatigue: Without deduplication, a property sitting on market for three weeks would generate 21 duplicate alerts, creating noise that erodes trust in the system entirely

Solution Overview

We built a daily n8n workflow that pulls fresh Zillow listings from three Milwaukee-area markets, filters them against Dane's investment criteria, fetches real market rent estimates from RentCast, runs both all-cash and financed ROI scenarios against those numbers, deduplicates against a Google Sheets tracker, and emails formatted alerts only for properties that hit 12% or higher. The system handles the research layer entirely. Dane's job is to decide, not to screen.

How It Works

  1. Schedule trigger: The n8n workflow fires once per day, pulling fresh listing data from Apify's Zillow scraper across Milwaukee, Waukesha, and Racine markets
  2. Criteria filtering: Three hardcoded rules run immediately after extraction. Properties outside the one-to-four unit range are dropped, zip codes 53206 and 53205 are excluded, and bank-owned properties are removed before any calculations run
  3. Market rent estimation: Each qualifying property address hits the RentCast API, which returns location-specific market rent estimates based on comparable properties. No guessing, no averages
  4. Dual-scenario ROI calculation: Every property gets calculated twice. All-cash: annual rent divided by purchase price. Financed: 30% down, 7% interest, 30-year loan, with mortgage payment, operating expenses (10% CapEx, 10% repairs, 9% vacancy, 8% management), plus actual Zillow tax and insurance data factored in
  5. Threshold filter and deduplication: Properties where neither scenario hits 12% are dropped. Qualifying addresses are checked against a Google Sheets tracker. If the property already triggered an alert this week without a price change, it is skipped
  6. Gmail delivery: Qualified new properties generate a formatted email with the Zillow link, full financial breakdown, cash-on-cash percentage, projected monthly cash flow, and the RentCast comp data used in the calculation. Everything needed to make a call decision in under two minutes
n8n workflow canvas showing daily schedule trigger, Apify Zillow scraper, RentCast API call, dual-scenario ROI filter, Google Sheets deduplication, and Gmail delivery nodes
The n8n workflow: daily trigger, Zillow scraper, RentCast API, ROI filter, deduplication, and Gmail delivery in a single automated sequence

Key Features

  • Dual-scenario analysis: Every property evaluated at both all-cash and financed returns. Qualified opportunities show the full picture regardless of how Dane ultimately structures the purchase
  • Real rent data via API: RentCast market estimates replace guesswork with address-level comparable data, making the ROI calculation defensible rather than approximate
  • Hardcoded exclusion logic: Foreclosures and specific zip codes are filtered before the API call stage, preventing wasted compute on properties that would never qualify
  • Smart deduplication: Google Sheets tracker eliminates repeat alerts for stale listings, keeping the daily email signal-to-noise ratio high enough to act on
  • Same-day delivery: Qualified properties arrive the morning they hit market. The difference between being the first call and the fifth

Tools Used

Video Walkthrough

Calculate Your ROI

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Real Estate Deal Analyzer

Run the same dual-scenario cash-on-cash calculation this system uses. Plug in any Milwaukee-area property and see all-cash vs. financed returns side by side in under a minute.

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Your Market Should Be Working While You Sleep

If you are a real estate investor manually screening listings that could be filtered in seconds, we should talk. We will map out exactly how this system would work for your criteria and target markets.

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