If you invest in Miami-Dade foreclosure auctions, you have four real options for research: the free official sources (realforeclose.com, the Clerk of Courts, and the Property Appraiser), national platforms like Auction.com or PropertyRadar, Florida aggregators like Property Onion, and BIDROI, which specializes in Miami-Dade and includes the legal and financial analysis in the subscription. The right choice depends on how much time you have, whether you need coverage outside Miami-Dade, and whether you want raw listings or a finished analysis.
Full disclosure: BIDROI is our product. Instead of pretending to be neutral, this guide tells you exactly what each option does and does not do — including when BIDROI is not the right fit — so you can decide with facts.
What can you do for free with the official sources?
Everything, in theory. Miami-Dade auctions run on miamidade.realforeclose.com, the county's official platform. The case file lives with the Clerk of Courts, the physical data with the Property Appraiser, permits and code violations in county databases, and recorded liens in the Official Records. All public, all free.
The cost is time. Researching one property well — reading the complaint (the lawsuit that started the foreclosure), checking which liens survive the sale, pulling comparable sales, checking permits, violations and flood zone — takes hours per property. With 15 to 40 auctions per week in Miami-Dade, doing this for every candidate is a full-time job. That is the gap every paid tool tries to close.
What do the national platforms offer?
Auction.com is the largest marketplace for bank-owned properties and foreclosure sales nationwide. It is strong if you want REO (bank-owned) inventory or auctions in many states, but it is a marketplace, not a research tool — the due diligence is still on you.
PropertyRadar is a research platform built for investors, strong in ownership data and marketing lists across several states. It is a good fit for high-volume direct-mail strategies. It does not read Miami-Dade court files for you or tell you which liens survive a specific sale.
What does Property Onion do?
Property Onion aggregates foreclosure and tax deed listings across Florida's counties, adds property data, and sells title searches one at a time as an add-on (pricing on their site). It also has a solid education section. If you bid in many Florida counties, that breadth is its main advantage.
The structural difference with BIDROI: Property Onion gives you listings plus optional per-property reports you pay for one by one; the interpretation is still your job. We wrote a dedicated comparison if you want the detail.
What does BIDROI do differently?
BIDROI covers one county — Miami-Dade — and goes deep instead of wide. For every auction, the platform reads the actual court file (including the complaint PDF), classifies the foreclosure type (bank, HOA, or association), estimates which debts a buyer would inherit, and combines market value, physical condition, and area competition into a single BIDROI Score plus a Strike Price — the most you should bid while keeping your margin.
It is also built on real auction results: across resolved Miami-Dade auctions BIDROI tracks, independent investors win about 4 of every 10, and the median winning bid lands about 33 percent above the final judgment. You can see aggregate numbers by ZIP code for free on our statistics page. BIDROI is fully bilingual (English and Spanish) and starts at $97 per month with a 7-day free trial — plans on the pricing page.
When is BIDROI NOT the right tool?
Honesty works both ways: