The Lead List That Builds Itself Every Monday

The situation

The client's best leads were hiding inside public city violation records: thousands of rows, with no easy way to tell which properties were worth contacting. Checking each record by hand meant looking up the property type, the age of the violation, and the type of defect, then making sure the owner had not already been contacted. It was slow, and the list was out of date by the time it was ready.

What we built

A scheduled workflow that runs every Monday. It pulls the latest violation data from NYC Open Data, adds property details from the city's PLUTO property records, and keeps only the records that match the client's rules: violations that are 35 to 65 days old, one to three family homes, and defect types tied to tree-root damage. It then checks every property against a contacted list in Airtable, so nobody is contacted twice, and turns the qualified records into a clean file for the outreach campaign.

The workflow also uploads that file, creates the campaign, and starts the outreach, then records each qualified property so the team can track it from lead to result.

How it works

SEE IT IN MOTIONPause

ODNYC Open DataViolation records

n8nRuns every Monday

AirtableContacted list

LBLobSends the outreach

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Step 1 of 4Every Monday, the workflow pulls the newest violation records from the city's open data.

An illustration of the steps below. Example flow only, no client data.

1. 01Every Monday, the workflow pulls the newest violation records from the city's open data.
2. 02Each record is matched to its property details, then filtered: violation age of 35 to 65 days, one to three family homes, and the defect types the client works on.
3. 03The shortlist is compared with the Airtable contacted list, and anyone already contacted is removed.
4. 04The clean list is uploaded, the campaign is created, and outreach starts. Each property is logged in Airtable so it can be tracked.

The challenges we solved

• The raw data holds thousands of records and no single field says "good lead", so the rules had to combine violation age, property type, and defect wording.
• Contacting the same owner twice wastes money and looks careless, so every run had to check a contacted list before anything was sent.
• The outreach tool needs the list in an exact file format, so the output had to match it every time without manual cleanup.

The result

Raw city data now becomes a targeted, campaign-ready lead list every Monday without anyone reviewing records by hand. Only properties that match the client's rules move forward, and no one who was already contacted goes back into a campaign.