Property Alerts Terms

Last updated: October 10, 2026

1. About these terms

Property Alerts is the part of Record Flag that sends alerts about public records of property in distress, such as notices of default and of trustee's sale, foreclosure lawsuits and sales, tax-default lists and tax sales, code-enforcement cases and probate notices, in California, Texas and Florida. It is operated by Record Flag, a sole proprietorship based in Sonoma County, California ("we", "us" or "our").

These Property Alerts Terms add to our Terms of Service and are part of them. They apply whenever you use Property Alerts, including its alert emails, account pages, exports, API and webhooks. If these terms and the Terms of Service conflict about Property Alerts, these terms control. By subscribing to or using Property Alerts, you agree to them, and you confirm that you will follow sections 5 to 8 every time you use it.

2. What we do and don't do

We find records that government offices publish and notices that state law requires to be published, quote them, link to them, and match them against the alerts you set up. Each alert shows the record as the source printed it, which can include the property's address, its parcel number and the owner's name.

We don't:

• contact homeowners, occupants or their families, or market to them;
• provide owners' phone numbers, email addresses, social media or other contact details, do skip tracing, or offer a person search;
• score, rank or profile owners, for example by guessing their age, finances, health or likelihood to sell;
• buy owner data from data brokers or other commercial sources;
• buy, sell or broker property, arrange loans, or offer foreclosure help of any kind; or
• take referral fees, commissions or a share of any deal. Our plans have flat prices, whatever you do with the alerts.

3. No government affiliation

Record Flag is an independent private service. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or acting for any county recorder, county clerk, clerk of court, court, tax collector, treasurer, city, trustee, lender, newspaper or other source. Using Property Alerts does not register you for any sale or auction, reserve a property, or give you any priority. How to bid, deposit or register for a sale is set by whoever runs it: the trustee, the clerk or the tax collector.

4. Accuracy: verify before you act

Public records can be wrong or late, and so can we. Sale dates change often: foreclosure sales are postponed, cancelled or reinstated, sometimes on the day of the sale. A default can be cured, a lawsuit dismissed or taxes paid after a record is published. In California, many trustee's sales of homes with one to four units are not final until 15 or 45 days after the auction (California Civil Code section 2924m). Our extraction is automated, including with machine-learning models, and can misread a record, match it to the wrong property or miss it entirely.

Before you act on an alert, verify it with the official source: the trustee named in the notice, the clerk of court, the county recorder or the tax collector. Every alert links to its source so you can. Property Alerts is not a title report, an appraisal, or legal, tax, investment or real estate advice. We are not responsible for a bid, purchase, loan, missed sale or any other decision you make using it.

5. Not a consumer report

Property Alerts is not a "consumer report", and we are not a "consumer reporting agency", under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) or similar state laws, such as California's Consumer Credit Reporting Agencies Act and Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act. We do not collect or provide it for those purposes.

You must not use Property Alerts, in whole or in part, as a factor in deciding anyone's eligibility for:

• credit or a loan;
• insurance;
• employment;
• renting or leasing a home (tenant screening); or
• any other purpose listed in section 604 of the FCRA (15 U.S.C. 1681b) or a similar state law.

If we learn that you use Property Alerts this way, we will end your access.

6. Acceptable use

You may use Property Alerts to research properties and markets for your own lawful business, for example to bid at public sales, make offers, list or finance property, represent clients, or study the market. You agree not to:

• harass, threaten, intimidate, pressure or shame homeowners, occupants or their families, or keep contacting anyone who has asked you to stop;
• mislead anyone about who you are or why you are contacting them, or suggest that you act for a government office, a court, the trustee or the lender;
• make false or misleading claims about a foreclosure, its timing or its consequences, or about what you can do to stop it;
• target people because of their age, disability, health, race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status or any other characteristic protected by law, or use Property Alerts in a way that violates fair housing laws;
• offer foreclosure "rescue", loan modification, forbearance or surplus-funds recovery services, or buy or lease back a home in foreclosure, except in full compliance with the laws in section 7 and with every license they require;
• contact or publish information about anyone you know, or should know, is protected by an address confidentiality program (such as California's Safe at Home program) or by a law protecting the home addresses of judges, officials or others;
• use Property Alerts for stalking, identity theft, fraud or any other unlawful purpose; or
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download Property Alerts outside the exports and API your plan includes.

Section 10 of the Terms of Service also applies.

7. Laws you must follow

You are responsible for following every law that applies to what you do with Property Alerts, and for holding every license, registration or bond it requires before you contact anyone. Depending on what you do and where, these include (this is not a complete list):

Foreclosure rescue, equity purchases and surplus funds

• California: the Mortgage Foreclosure Consultants Act (Civil Code section 2945 and following), the Home Equity Sales Contracts Act (Civil Code section 1695 and following), the ban on advance fees for loan modification or forbearance services (Civil Code section 2944.7), the rules on excess proceeds from tax sales (Revenue and Taxation Code section 4675), and the elder financial abuse law (Welfare and Institutions Code section 15610.30).
• Florida: the law on foreclosure-rescue consultants and equity purchasers (Florida Statutes section 501.1377), the rules on selling or assigning the right to surplus funds from a foreclosure sale (section 45.033), and the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (section 501.201 and following).
• Texas: the rules on sale-leasebacks of homesteads (Property Code section 41.006), on selling residential property that is subject to a lien (Property Code section 5.016), on executory contracts for conveyance, including lease-options (Property Code section 5.061 and following), on excess proceeds from tax sales (Tax Code section 34.04), on selling or assigning an interest in a purchase contract (Occupations Code section 1101.0045), the licensing of anyone who offers or negotiates mortgage loan terms (Finance Code chapter 180), and the Deceptive Trade Practices-Consumer Protection Act (Business and Commerce Code section 17.41 and following).
• Federal: the Mortgage Assistance Relief Services rule (Regulation O, 12 C.F.R. part 1015), which bans advance fees for mortgage relief services.

Your own marketing

• Calls and texts: the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (47 U.S.C. 227) and the FCC's rules, the Telemarketing Sales Rule (16 C.F.R. part 310) and the National Do Not Call Registry, and state laws such as Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act (Florida Statutes section 501.059), Texas's telemarketing law and no-call list (Business and Commerce Code chapter 304), and California's telemarketing rules.
• Email: the CAN-SPAM Act (15 U.S.C. 7701 and following) and California Business and Professions Code section 17529.5.
• A public record is not consent. That an owner appears in a public record does not give you permission to call, text or email them.

Licenses and professional rules

Real estate, mortgage, legal and other professional licensing laws and rules, including rules on soliciting clients and on advertising, as they apply to you.

8. No bulk resale or redistribution

Your subscription is for your own business and, on a plan that includes them, the people on your team. You may share an individual record with a client, partner, lender or attorney working with you on that property, as long as you keep its source and link. You may not:

• resell, sublicense, publish or share Property Alerts data in bulk, as a list, a feed, a database or a lead product;
• post lists of properties or owners from Property Alerts on a website, social media or a marketplace; or
• use Property Alerts to build a competing product.

Public records stay public: nothing here limits your right to get a record from its original source.

9. Data sources and attribution

Property Alerts comes from public sources, including county recorders and county clerks (for example, notices of trustee's sale filed and posted under Texas Property Code section 51.002, and notices of default and of sale recorded under California Civil Code section 2924 and following), clerks of court and their foreclosure and tax deed sale calendars, county tax collectors and treasurers, city code-enforcement records, published legal notices, and the public agendas of city councils and county boards.

We read sources the way the public does and follow each website's rules, including its robots.txt file and terms of use. Where a source does not allow automated collection, we do not collect from it that way; we ask the office for the records instead or leave it out. Each alert names its source and links to it. When you show a record to someone else, keep the source and link, and don't present it as an official government record.

10. Removal requests

Anyone can ask us to stop showing a property at Record Flag removal requests. We confirm each request by email and honor confirmed requests within one business day. After that, the property no longer appears in alerts, exports, API results or webhooks, including alerts you set up before the request. If we tell you a property has been removed, stop using what you received from us about it. Removal does not change the public record itself.

11. Complaints, suspension and cooperation

We take complaints from homeowners and others seriously. We may ask you about your use of Property Alerts, and we may suspend or end your access, without a refund, if we reasonably believe you have broken these terms or the law, or if your use puts homeowners, us or others at risk. We may cooperate with regulators and law enforcement investigating misuse. To report misuse, email support@recordflag.com.

12. Indemnity and liability

In addition to section 18 of the Terms of Service, you will defend and indemnify us against third-party claims arising from your use of Property Alerts, including your contact with owners and occupants and any violation of the laws in section 7, and pay the resulting losses and reasonable costs, including attorneys' fees. The disclaimer of warranties and the limitation of liability in sections 16 and 17 of the Terms of Service apply to Property Alerts.

13. Governing law

These terms are part of the Terms of Service, so section 21 of the Terms of Service applies: California law, informal resolution first, and the courts of Sonoma County, California.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will post the new version on this page and update the date at the top. For material changes, we will give at least 30 days' notice by email or in the Service before they take effect, as section 20 of the Terms of Service describes.

15. Contact

Record Flag
708 Gravenstein Hwy N #3107, Sebastopol, CA 95472
Email: support@recordflag.com