BatchLeads vs PropStream: what each one actually costs

The short answer

BatchLeads and PropStream solve two different halves of the same job. PropStream is a property database you search. BatchLeads is a list you work. If your day is comps, equity checks, and studying a market before you buy, PropStream earns its seat. If your day is building a list, tracing it, and hitting the phone and the mailbox, BatchLeads sits closer to what you actually do.

On the shelf the prices look like a coin flip. PropStream opens at $99 a month. BatchLeads opens at $119. Twenty dollars apart. Case closed, right? Not even close. That gap is a decoy, and by the fourth section you will see why the real number swings by hundreds depending on one thing: how many owners you skip trace.

What each one actually is

PropStream is a search tool sitting on roughly 155 million property records drawn from county recordings, MLS records, and private data feeds, per the company's own FAQ. You set filters (pre-foreclosure, high equity, out-of-state owner, tired landlord) and it returns matching parcels with owner names, mortgage estimates, comparable sales, and tax history. Skip tracing and mail are things you buy on top, by the record.

BatchLeads runs the other direction. It is built to assemble a list, stack it against other lists so the owner who shows up on three distress signals at once floats to the top, then reach that owner. Phone numbers and emails come bundled on every plan. Text and direct mail live on the same screen. A separate product, BatchDialer, bolts on power dialing for $89 a month.

Same raw material, the same public-record property data every provider in this space resells, pointed at two entirely different verbs. One tool says analyze. The other says contact. Almost every argument people have about which is better is really an argument about which verb their business runs on.

The price tables, side by side

Here is what each company publishes as of August 2026. Prices drift, so open both pages before you put in a card.

Both run a 7-day trial, and PropStream throws in 50 free leads to test with. BatchLeads knocks 40% off if you commit for a year. Read across the rows and one line jumps out: PropStream meters skip tracing, BatchLeads folds it in. Hold that thought.

Treat everything below as a buying guide, not financial advice. The right tool is the one that fits your own numbers, so price each plan against the volume you actually run before you commit, and reprice it when your deal flow changes. Software bills scale with your list, and a plan that is cheap at 500 records a month can be the expensive choice at 8,000.

Where the $99 headline breaks

The advice you see in every forum thread — start with PropStream, it is the cheap one — is wrong for most wholesalers, and the arithmetic takes ten seconds. PropStream skip tracing runs 12¢ a contact on Essentials. Pull and trace 5,000 owners in a month, a routine number for anyone farming a mid-size county, and that is 5,000 times $0.12, or $600, stacked on the $99 subscription. Your real invoice reads $699. Not $99.

BatchLeads Growth is $119 with phone numbers and emails included across its 10,000 monthly leads. Trace those same 5,000 owners and the bill is still $119. Same month, same list, a $580 swing, and the tool everyone calls expensive turns out to be the bargain.

Now flip the workload. Trace 200 owners a month because you buy in a tight farm and underwrite each deal by hand, and PropStream's $99 plus $24 in traces slides under BatchLeads' $119, with deeper comps for the money. So the honest takeaway is not that one tool is cheaper. It is that cheaper depends on how many records you touch, and any comparison that skips the multiplication is quietly selling you the wrong one.

Data depth, and how accurate it really is

PropStream's 155-million-record file refreshes on a cadence worth knowing before you trust it: MLS data daily, vacancy monthly, tax assessor data annually, with some counties faster. That schedule tells you exactly what the tool is sharp at, which is active-market comps and analysis, and where it drags, which is anything hinging on a change the county recorded last week.

BatchLeads is fed by BatchData, which advertises a 76% right-party-contact rate on skip tracing, roughly three times what it calls the industry average, on its own page. Read that as a seller's number, not an audited one. No skip-tracing provider publishes an independent accuracy study. Every one of them quotes a figure that flatters the house: PropStream's traces draw mixed user reviews, BatchData claims 76%, a rival named ReSimpli claims 95%. Believe none of them until your own list, dialed by your own VA, coughs up your own hit rate. That number is the only one that pays you.

Stacking a list versus filtering one

The workflow difference nobody puts a price on is how each tool finds the owner worth mailing. PropStream filters. You ask for high-equity absentee owners across three ZIP codes and it returns everyone who fits, a flat list you then have to rank yourself. BatchLeads stacks. You pull a pre-foreclosure list, a tax-delinquent list, and a vacant list, drop them on top of each other, and the owners who land on two or three at once rise to the top with a score attached.

An owner carrying three distress signals is measurably likelier to sell than one carrying a single flag, and stacking surfaces those names in seconds rather than over a spreadsheet afternoon. That one feature is why high-volume operators lean BatchLeads even when PropStream's underlying data runs deeper. A deep database you must hand-sort loses to a shallower one that hands you the 40 owners worth calling first. If your real skill is picking the right 40 out of 4,000, stacking is the thing you are buying, and PropStream leaves that step for you to build.

What you still do yourself, either way

Both products stop short of a finished pipeline, and neither one hides it. Neither prints and mails at scale for you. Neither ranks owners by how likely they are to sell. They sort by category, asking whether a parcel sits in pre-foreclosure or not, but they do not score the owner inside that bucket, so a house two payments behind and a house one skipped notice from auction land in the same bucket for you to untangle.

PropStream does bundle free Do Not Call scrubbing against the federal and state DNC lists, which matters the moment you dial. BatchLeads hands you the numbers but the scrubbing discipline is on you, and the FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule wants that list re-scrubbed at least every 31 days. Mail sidesteps the whole DNC question, which is one quiet reason a lot of high-volume operators drift back to postcards after a season of burned phone hours.

Direct mail and the real cost of doing it yourself

PropStream sells postcards from 57¢ each. BatchLeads fires mail and text from the same dashboard. Either way the list, the design, the send order, and the follow-up stay your job. That is fine if you like the work and own the hours. Count them straight, though: pull the list, stack it, trace it, design a card, upload, schedule six touches across three months, then re-pull as owners sell and new ones slip into distress. For a 2,000-piece farm that is close to a full day a month, every month, before a single seller calls back.

None of that is wasted if the doing is your edge. It is pure overhead if your edge is closing. The right tool depends on which of those two sentences describes you, and most people answer it wrong because the software is fun and the follow-up is not.

Which one fits your week

Sort yourself by the verb. If you are a wholesaler pushing volume — hundreds of traces, mail and texts going out weekly — BatchLeads matches the motion and the bundled contacts keep the bill flat. If you are a flipper or buy-and-hold buyer underwriting a handful of deals a month, PropStream's comps and rehab estimators are worth more to you than a dialer you will barely touch, and your trace count is low enough that the per-record fee never bites.

If you are a listing agent trying to farm a neighborhood, be honest that neither tool was built for you. Both aim at investors hunting off-market owners, not agents nurturing a geographic list for the next 18 months. You can force either one to work, or you can use something pointed at your actual job. That is the seam the third option fills.

The parts most comparisons skip

Two costs rarely reach the feature tables and both are real. Seats come first. PropStream Pro includes two users and Elite includes nine, while BatchLeads meters by leads rather than logins, so a three-person acquisition team runs into those ceilings from opposite ends. Price the tool for your whole team, not one seat. The mobile side is the other blind spot. PropStream ships a driving-for-dollars app that logs houses you pass and files them straight into your lists, which a rehabber scouting neighborhoods opens daily and a desk-bound analyst never touches. If half your sourcing happens from the truck, that app is worth more than any spec sheet admits.

The third door, and when to walk through it

There is a version of this decision where you skip the tool question entirely. Farmrix does not sell you a database to search or a raw list to trace. It scores every owner in your market on how likely they are to sell in the next 6 to 12 months, ranks them, and prints and mails postcards to the top of that list. 500 ranked owners with 500 postcards is $1,195. Step up to 2,000 and 2,000 and it is $3,495. You are buying the finished campaign instead of the raw data and a standing weekend commitment.

It is the wrong buy if you are a data hound who wants to underwrite every parcel yourself — get PropStream and enjoy the rabbit hole. It is the wrong buy if you are tracing 500 owners a month on a shoestring, where BatchLeads Growth and a cheap mail house will carry you. It is the right buy when the thing you are short on is hours, not data, and when less mail sent to better-ranked owners beats more mail sorted by hand. Still torn between the two tools, weigh our side-by-side takes on PropStream and BatchLeads, or the PropStream alternative page, then buy back the hour you keep spending on the part of this you like least.