Zillow Deal Finder: AI Cap Rate, Cash Flow & Price-Cut Scoring on the Apify Store →

How to find cash-flowing Zillow deals without a spreadsheet

A step-by-step tutorial for Zillow Deal Finder on Apify — cap rate, cash flow and motivated-seller signals for every listing of a Zillow search, at your own financing terms.

The problem: an evening of copy-paste per market

Every buy-and-hold investor and wholesaler runs the same loop. Open a Zillow search. Copy 50–200 listings into a spreadsheet. Type in the rent estimate, the tax, the insurance. Compute the mortgage at your down payment and rate, then cash flow, NOI, cap rate and cash-on-cash. Check which sellers already cut their price, which listings are FSBO, which are foreclosures. Sort. Next week the same listings come back mixed with three new ones, and you do it again.

Raw Zillow scrapers remove the copying, but they charge for every row — rentals, building cards, duplicates — and still leave the math to you. Analysis tools such as DealCheck do the math, but only for the one property you type in. Zillow Deal Finder joins the two: it runs a Zillow search, does the investment math on every listing and hands back only the deals that pass your rules, best first.

Step 1 — Run the free demo (30 seconds, nothing charged)

Open the Store page and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with six sample listings from Cleveland and Columbus (fictional addresses, realistic numbers). Press Start.

The run's OUTPUT record shows the funnel: 6 rows loaded, 1 rental building card skipped, 2 listings under the minimum score of 60 (the lake-view condo and the Columbus house), 3 qualified deals — all three graded A. This is the output of that demo run, shortened:

Address (sample)	Price	Rent used	Cash flow / mo	Cap rate	Cash-on-cash	Under Zestimate	Score	Signals
2255 Demo Rd, Cleveland 44109 (duplex)	$165,000	$2,300	+$748	11.43%	19.42%	12.2%	97 A	foreclosure, seller language
1207 Example St, Cleveland 44109	$89,900	$1,350	+$428	11.7%	20.4%	14.0%	95 A	FSBO, 96 days on Zillow
3418 Sample Ave, Cleveland 44109	$129,000	$1,650	+$445	10.13%	14.78%	9.2%	88 A	4.4% price cut

Every row also carries the 1% rule, flip math (ARV, 70%-rule maximum offer, profit after costs), who to contact and a one-line pitch. The FSBO row's pitch reads: "3bd single family in Cleveland, OH 44109 at $89,900 · cash flow +$428/mo, cap rate 11.7% · 14.0% under Zestimate · FSBO — call the owner", and its sellerPhrases are quoted verbatim from the listing: "Investor special", "sold as-is", "cash only", "needs TLC".

Step 2 — Type your market

Put a city, county or ZIP into Cities or ZIP codes — Memphis, TN, 44109. The Actor builds the Zillow search for you (a URL copied from zillow.com works too, in searchUrls). That switches the run from the demo to the live search: Zillow Search Scraper runs on your own Apify account, capped by maxDiscoveryChargeUsd ($0.50 by default), so a first search can never cost more than that cap on the source side. The live search needs an Apify plan that can run Store Actors; on the free plan you can score a dataset or rows you paste in (sourceMode: list).

Step 3 — Set your terms

minScore (60 by default) decides what you pay for: a listing under it is neither delivered nor charged.
Hard criteria, all free filters: minMonthlyCashFlow: 150, minCapRatePct, minDiscountToZestimatePct: 10, minBedrooms, maxPrice, requireOnePercentRule.
Financing: 25% down, 7%, 30 years unless you change them; plus closing costs, tax rate, insurance, vacancy, maintenance and management percentages. The terms behind every number are written into the row's assumptions.
Strategy: listingGoal: rental weighs cap rate, cash flow and the 1% rule; flip weighs the discount, $/sqft under the ZIP median and seller motivation.

Step 4 — Read the views

Deals land best-first in five views: Shortlist (price, cash flow, cap rate, discount, score, signals), Deal math (the full rental analysis), Flip math (ARV, rehab estimate, maximum allowable offer, profit), Motivated sellers (price cuts, days on Zillow, FSBO, foreclosure, bank-owned, auction) and Outreach (the contact route — agent e-mail, then phone, then Zillow's contact form — and the seller's own words). Export any view as CSV, Excel or JSON.

Step 5 — Turn on the AI memo

With enableAi on, each deal also gets a short memo, red flags, upsides, the condition read from the listing text and a fit score against your own brief (investorGoal). For the FSBO sample above, against the brief "Cash-flowing 3+ bedroom single-family homes under $200k in Ohio; light rehab is fine", the README's example memo flags "Sold as-is, cash only — financing may not be accepted" and "Only 9 photos on the listing" as red flags and rates the condition light-rehab. Every number in a memo is checked against the row; a sentence with a number that is not in the row is dropped.

What a run costs

You pay per qualified deal: $0.004 with the math only, $0.015 with the AI memo, and the first 25 deals on your account are free. There is no start fee, and rentals, rows without a price, deals under minScore and repeats are never charged. The Zillow search itself is billed by Zillow Search Scraper on your account.

The page's worked example — an estimate, not yet a measured run — is one Cleveland search of 200 listings: about $0.46 for the source, about 30 qualified deals, 30 × $0.015 plus about $0.06 of AI tokens, roughly $0.97 in total ($0.58 with the AI off). Your first run is cheaper because of the 25 free deals. The run's OUTPUT record shows the real funnel and charges, so you can check the estimate against your own market.

Automate it: new deals in your inbox every week

Click Save as a new task, then Schedule (weekly or daily), and put your address in notifyEmail. The Actor remembers every deal it delivered by Zillow id and price, so the next run returns only new deals and deals whose price dropped (isNewPriceCut) — and charges only for those. From code:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/zillow-deal-finder-ai").call(
    run_input={"locations": ["Cleveland, OH"], "minScore": 60, "minMonthlyCashFlow": 150,
               "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5},
    timeout_secs=3600,
)
for deal in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(deal["address"], deal["score"], deal["monthlyCashFlow"], deal["capRatePct"], deal["contactRoute"])

Prefer no code? A webhook, Slack, Google Sheets, n8n, Make and Zapier recipe — and an MCP line for Claude or ChatGPT — are in the Integrations section of the Store page.

The fine print

The math is an estimate from the listing and your assumptions, not financial advice. The data is what Zillow publishes — no login, no skip tracing. But it turns an evening of spreadsheet work into a ranked list you can start calling from on Monday morning. Try the free demo.

Zillow Deal Finder: AI Cap Rate, Cash Flow & Price-Cut Scoring on the Apify Store →