Claude Desktop App | Claude Chrome Extension | Country portal | Country Research Skill | Research message
If you’ve invested any real amount of land, you already know the part of this business that no one brags about. It’s real estate research.
You get the parcel data, check the flood zone, look at the slope, confirm access, and copy some numbers into your CRM or spreadsheet. Then you turn around and do it all over again for the next property, and the next.
The information itself is incredibly valuable. Collecting it, on the other hand, is slow, repetitive, and honestly a little mind-numbing. If you’re researching multiple properties a day, this single task can quietly consume hours of your week.
I recently stumbled upon something that changes this greatly and I wanted to explain how it works. It is a combination of two tools that work together: Country portal and Claude Cowork. When you put them side by side, you can put aside boring research and do almost anything else while it happens in the background.
First, what exactly is Claude Cowork?
You’re probably already familiar with Claude. It is the AI assistant that many people use as an alternative to ChatGPT and, in many ways, It’s better.
Claude Cowork However, it’s several levels beyond the normal chat experience, because it doesn’t just talk to you. It is a desktop application that you install on your Windows or Mac PC, and once it runs, it can take control of your computer and perform tasks on your behalf.
You can browse the Internet, move files on your machine, and complete multi-step tasks just like a person would. Some people even go so far as to buy a second computer just to allow Claude Cowork to run on it out of the way. I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I understand the appeal.
The simplest way I can describe it is like hiring a smart college intern who works 24 hours a day without getting tired or bored.
I’ll be completely honest with you about one thing before we continue. To use Claude Cowork, you need a paid plan. The $20/month option works well for occasional tasks, but I continued to encounter usage limits because this tool does a lot of work behind the scenes.
I ended up upgrading to the $100/month plan to stop hitting those walls. It sounds expensive, I know, but if you use it the way it’s meant to be used, it pays for itself quickly. In many ways, it’s like having an employee, except they can work overnight and correct their own mistakes when you point them out.
What Land Portal provides
If you have ever used Country portalyou know it’s an incredible source of real estate data. You search for a parcel by address, owner name, APN, or latitude and longitude, and it gives you a mountain of useful information: flood data, slope reports, AI market reports, comparisons, and most of the things a domestic investor needs to know before closing a deal.
All the data is there. The problem is that achieving it still requires time and mental effort. You need to log in, click, copy the details to wherever you save your records, and repeat.
If you are not already a Land Portal user, you can sign up through the REtipster affiliate link and get 1000 free exports to try it out.
So this is exactly the kind of repetitive, valuable, boring work that Claude Cowork is designed to take off your shoulders. There are two ways to configure it and I want to show you both because each one suits a different situation.
Method one: the browser-based method
The first method I discovered is to have Claude Cowork log into his Land Portal account through Chrome and do the exact same click and copy that you would normally do yourself.
For this to work, you will need to install it. Claude Chrome Extensionwhich is free and lasts about a minute. That extension is what allows Claude Cowork to view your browser and operate it on your behalf.
To save you the hassle of writing instructions from scratch, I’ve put together a ready-made message that you can access grab here. All you have to do is paste it in, fill out the state, county, and parcel number and press Enter.
From there, you can sit back and watch a bright orange frame appear around your browser, which is Claude’s way of showing you that he’s looking at the screen. Select the state, search for the county, paste in the parcel number and scan the data exactly as you would.
Now here’s where it gets a little peculiar. From time to time, Claude will pause and ask you something, such as if you found the right package or if you can take a screenshot to generate your report.
It doesn’t play any sound when it stops, so my advice is to keep Claude Cowork’s window visible so you can detect when he needs a quick yes from you.
When he’s done, he hands you a clean, professional Word document with all the property details laid out, including red flags like a county assessment gap or missing FEMA flood data, as well as the positives.
This method works well, but I’ll be honest with you. It’s slow. A single package took about ten minutes.
The good thing is that speed hardly matters because Claude does this while you do more important work (or while you sleep). If you load twenty packets before you leave the office, you can review them one by one overnight and have a stack of reports waiting for you in the morning.
Method two: the API method (much faster)
Once I got comfortable with the slow method, I found a way to do the same job in about ten seconds instead of ten minutes.
Land Portal now offers API access, available in the API section of your profile. You click “generate API key,” give it a name, and it spits out a long string of characters.
A word of caution here, because this part is important. That API key is essentially the key to your Land Portal account. If someone else gets hold of it, it could result in a serious charge to your account.
So you don’t want to carelessly paste it anywhere, and you actually don’t want to paste it directly into the chat. Instead, drop it into a text file, save it to a dedicated folder that Claude Cowork can access, and then point Claude to the file. Recover the password from your computer instead of the conversation, which keeps it more secure.
The second piece is what makes this method shine. I created a Land Portal Plot Research Skills file that you can download and install. A skills file is just a big set of instructions that tell Claude exactly how to do this specific job.
You double click on it, click “add to library” and that’s it.
From there, you simply tell Claude, “Use Land Portal’s Parcel Research ability to compile a report on this parcel,” provide the state, county, and parcel number, and let it run.
Because it works through the API, there’s no browser, no bright orange box, and no clicks. Simply extract the data and create the report behind the scenes in less than a minute.
The downside is that this approach consumes your Claude tokens faster, precisely because it requires no effort. If you want to research properties at scale, say a spreadsheet of a hundred parcels at a time, you’ll probably want the Pro plan or higher so you don’t run out of space.
An honest word of caution
If you’ve ever had to deal with AI making things up, you’re probably already wondering if you can trust these reports.
Here’s my real advice: don’t fully trust them the first few times you use this. Go line by line and compare what Claude pulled out with what is actually shown in the Land Portal. After you’ve done this a few times, you’ll probably see what I’ve seen: The data is mostly accurate.
Where your own brain still earns its keep is in the red flags and positives section. Don’t just confirm that the facts are accurate. Ask yourself if you would come to the same conclusions that Claude did, because sometimes things will come up that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
The bigger picture
Here’s something that should drive this home. I’ve heard of people selling done-for-you due diligence reports for $97 or even $200 each, and people happily pay for them. Claude is doing an almost identical job with almost no effort on your part. There is great value sitting here.
And real estate reports are just the starting point. Once you have that API connection in place, you can perform automated deal scoring that ranks a list of packages based on spend quality, run on-demand comparison analysis, handle skip tracking, and automate parts of your mailing campaigns.
If you’re using a CRM like Land Portal along with Stride, Claude Cowork can connect to both through their APIs and manage much of your workflow without you logging into either of them.
It wasn’t a complicated setup, but it was a genuine unlock, and I’m still thinking about everything it makes possible. You will no longer have to dedicate your limited hours to monotonous research that, while extremely important, is also extremely boring.
My hope is that this opens your mind a little and makes you think about what you could deliver next. If you try it and find a clever use that I hadn’t thought of, I’d really love to hear about it.
