Distress Meter AI review for scoring property lists

What Distress Meter AI is and who it is for

Distress Meter AI is a property scoring tool for real estate wholesalers. You give it a list of addresses, it pulls a Google Street View image of each one, and an AI model looks for visible signs of distress such as damaged siding, a tarped roof, boarded windows or an overgrown yard. Each property comes back with a distress score from 0 to 10 and a short note on what the model saw.

The aim is to replace part of driving for dollars, where investors drive neighborhoods looking for run-down houses whose owners might sell. Instead of driving a whole list, you rank it first and spend your time on the properties that look worst.

The site names three groups: solo wholesalers ranking weekly lists, small teams who want a consistent scoring standard, and software products that want distress data through an API. It is a US-focused tool, and the address format it asks for is street, city, state and zip.

Key features

Distress score and notes

The output is simple. For each address you get a score and a list of visible issues. A sample row on the site reads "damaged siding; peeling paint; overgrown yard" with a score of 7. The output file also includes a link to the Street View image used, so you can see what the model was judging.

On its partners page the vendor says the engine runs on Azure, uses more than 15 visual indicators and was trained on over 100,000 distressed property images. Those are the vendor's own claims and I have no way to check them.

Paste, CSV or API

For small batches you can paste addresses straight into the web app. For bigger lists you upload a CSV and download an output CSV when the job finishes. Developers can use the API, which takes JSON or CSV jobs, lets you poll job status and returns CSV or JSON results. There is Swagger documentation, and you can send your own property IDs so the results match your records.

Partner and white-label options

For real estate data platforms, the vendor offers direct API integration, a revenue share where you sell a distress layer to your users, and a white-label version. It also mentions a permanent delete option for wiping submitted data.

Pricing and plans

You pay per address checked, with monthly bundles. Only completed checks count, so failed or invalid addresses are not billed.

Bulk plans have no automatic overages. When you run out you can buy one-time add-on packs that last until the end of the billing period, or upgrade. Monthly limits reset each cycle and do not roll over. The free 100 addresses need no credit card.

Limits and drawbacks

• It only sees the outside of the house. The vendor is upfront that there are no comps, no ownership data and no equity or lien information. A high score tells you a house looks rough, not that the owner wants to sell.
• Street View can be old. The image may show a house before it was repaired or sold. The vendor's answer is that a fixed-up house that used to look distressed points to an active cash buyer nearby, which is a fair angle but does not help if you wanted a current condition check.
• Image quality is reduced. The pricing page says images are optimized for AI analysis and may look worse than Street View itself.
• It is a small operation. The partner contact is a named person at a Gmail address, the webhook settings page is marked as coming soon, and I could not find independent customer reviews today. None of that is a problem in itself, but I would start on the free credits and a monthly plan rather than anything larger.
• Street View image links in the output are public short links, according to the API docs, which is worth knowing if you share result files.

Alternatives

• Driving for dollars apps such as DealMachine, if you still want to drive and tag properties yourself and pair them with owner data.
• Property data platforms such as PropStream, if your lists start from equity, liens or absentee owners rather than visible condition.
• A virtual assistant checking Street View by hand, which is slower but can be fine for small lists.

Verdict

Distress Meter AI does one narrow job and explains it clearly: rank a list of addresses by how distressed the outside of each house looks, using Street View and AI. The pay per address model and free 100 addresses make it easy to test on your own market before spending anything. I would pick it if I ran lists of a few thousand addresses a month and wanted a first filter before driving. I would skip it for small lists, or if I mainly needed motivated seller data that a picture of the house cannot show.