Which distressed seller leads actually sell? The count across 2,463 counties

Between October 2024 and March 2025, 392,269 homeowners across 492 counties watched their listing expire or get cancelled. Within a year, 46,597 of them sold the house off-market, with no MLS listing, the kind of sale a mail investor can actually win.

In the same counties, over the same stretch, 35 million owners sat on the most-sold list in the business: free and clear. About 525,000 of them sold off-market. That sounds like a lot of houses until you divide. It works out to about 1.5 of every 100, a little under a house picked at random.

Same county records, same year, two very different lists. So we counted all of them.

The count, list by list

For every county with enough records to measure, we took each list as it stood, then checked the county's deed records for an off-market, arm's-length sale afterward. Lists that start with a filing (a foreclosure, an expired listing, a lien) were counted from the filing date. Lists that just sit there (vacant, behind on taxes, free and clear) were counted over the same 12 months. Then we put a house picked at random in the same counties next to each one.

Source: GoForClose count of off-market, arm's-length deeds in county records. Owners sold off-market, by list: foreclosure filed 6,478; expired or cancelled 46,597; lien 18,241; judgment 1,478; vacant 31,671; taxes 2 to 4 years 44,912; taxes 5+ years 17,430; high equity 272,773; free and clear 524,749; owner 65+ 37,050. A county is counted for a list only where the list was big enough to measure, so each row covers a different set of counties, and each row's random-house figure is for its own counties.

The filings sit at the top, everywhere we looked

Foreclosure filings and expired listings didn't just win on average. In every one of the 99 counties where we could measure foreclosure filings, and every one of the 492 for expired listings, those owners sold off-market more often than a random house. Not one county went the other way.

Liens on the property came close to that. Across 249 counties, owners with a lien filed sold at about 4.2 of every 100 within 12 months of the filing, and no county we measured put them below a random house.

A filing is a dated moment. Something happened to this owner, on this day, and the county wrote it down. That's why these lists also have a clock. Expired listings were busiest in the first three months after the listing died in 476 of 492 counties. Foreclosure filings mostly came later, after month three, in 83 of 99. If you want the timing for your own lists, here's how each one runs.

The lists you can pull with one click sit at the bottom

Look at the last three rows. Free and clear, high equity, owner 65+ living elsewhere. Those are the filters every list tool puts at the top of the menu, and they're the biggest lists in the table by far: 54 million names between them, with plenty of owners on more than one.

They're also the weakest. Free and clear owners sold off-market below a random house in 1,492 of 2,170 counties. Owners 65+ living elsewhere did in 754 of 823. High equity was a coin flip: below a random house in 844 of 1,794 counties, above it in the rest.

Those filters didn't cost you anything extra; they're inside the tool you already pay for. What they cost is everything after the export. Skip tracing, postage and your hours cost exactly as much on an owner who was never going to sell as on one who was. Mail 5,000 free and clear owners and, at the national rate, about 75 of them sell off-market in the next year. Mail 5,000 expired listings and it's closer to 600.

The middle is where your county decides

The top and bottom of the table held up almost everywhere. The middle didn't.

Vacant houses beat a random house in 460 of 468 counties, but by very different margins. In Wayne County, MI (Detroit), about 4.1 of every 100 vacant houses sold off-market within 12 months, against about 1.7 of every 100 houses at random. In San Diego County, CA it was about 0.9 against 0.4, and the vacant list there is a few thousand houses, not fifty thousand.

Tax delinquency moved even more. Owners two to four years behind sold below a random house in 22 of 479 counties, and whether older debt or newer debt sells better flips from county to county, sometimes between two counties in the same state.

Judgments against the owner were the weakest filing in the table: about 1.8 of every 100 within 12 months, below a random house in 31 of 70 counties.

What's missing, and why

Two lists every investor asks about aren't in the table.

Probate. The licensed records we counted carry probate too thinly to measure county by county. That gap is real for anyone buying lists: if a list service's probate comes from the same licensed feed, it has the same holes. We pull probate cases straight from the court dockets for that reason.

Divorce. We could measure it in only 11 counties. There, about 4.8 of every 100 divorcing owners sold off-market within 12 months of the filing, against about 2.1 of every 100 houses at random. Eleven counties is too few to call it a national pattern, so treat it as a hint, not a rule.

How to use this before you buy a list

Start at the top of the table and work down until your budget runs out. Most investors do the reverse: they start with the biggest list, because it's the easiest to pull, and they run out of money somewhere in the free and clear owners.

If you remember one thing from the table: lists that start with a filing sell; lists that start with a filter mostly don't.

Then check your own county, because the middle rows are the ones that move. The free county read shows every list your county's records can measure, in your county's order, and the window each one sold in. No email needed.