Sean O'Toole's got the details on California foreclosures

The "five Ds of foreclosure," as O'Toole calls them, refers to the life crises that had typically triggered the lender's repossession of a home.

If a household's main breadwinner dies, for example, the surviving spouse may not be able to keep up the mortgage payments and thus may be forced to give up the house.

O'Toole capitalized on the five Ds in 2002, when the real estate market was taking off and foreclosures were few and far between. Rather than compete with thousands of speculators flipping new homes, he scoured property records to find distressed houses. Over the next few years he bought and sold 152 such properties.

Now, as foreclosures multiply across California and bargain-hunting investors are starting to snap them up, O'Toole has stopped trading foreclosed houses and is instead selling a sixth D: data.

O'Toole, 40, founded the website ForeclosureRadar.com last year. The site, he said, lists every default, auction and foreclosure in California. Such information is crucial to investors seeking properties to buy, and before Internet listing services such as ForeclosureRadar.com emerged in recent years, the information often required a personal visit to county records offices.

Rather than join the rush of those mining for gold in distressed real estate, O'Toole has set himself up as Levi Strauss once did. Instead of selling jeans to prospectors, though, he is selling foreclosure data to would-be buyers.

ForeclosureRadar.com has about 1,000 clients who pay $50 a month for access to the database, O'Toole said. Along with investors, subscribers include real estate brokers and local government officials who use foreclosed-home data for such tasks as locating stagnant swimming pools for mosquito abatement, he said.

The site, which O'Toole started with his own money, is on track to be profitable by 2009, he said.

A former Silicon Valley entrepreneur, O'Toole got the idea for the site when the volume of foreclosures grew so large that he couldn't quickly track them by going to county offices or hiring others to pull records. He figured investors and real estate brokers would be eager for online records covering all counties in California. The site allows users to search foreclosures by cities, ZIP Codes and street names.