Which motivated seller lists actually sell in my county?

Most of us pick lists the way we were taught. Somebody in a mastermind said pre-foreclosures, so we mailed pre-foreclosures. Somebody else said tired landlords, so we pulled absentee owners. Then the phone stayed quiet and we blamed the letter.

The county already knows which lists sold. Every deed gets recorded. Line those deeds up against the lists you can buy and you get a scoreboard for your own market, one you can check before you spend a dollar on postage.

Two counties, two different winners

Harris County, Texas is Houston. Duval County, Florida is Jacksonville. Plenty of investors mail both, often with the same lists in the same order. The two counties don't reward the same ones.

In Harris County, expired and cancelled listings led. Of every 100 owners whose listing expired or was cancelled, about 15 sold off-market within 12 months of the filing.

In Duval County, foreclosure filings led instead: about 19 of every 100 sold off-market within 12 months, while expired listings came in at about 9 of every 100 over the same 12 months.

Read the shaded bottom row of each table first. That's a house picked at random in the same county. A list that can't beat it is buying you stamps and nothing else.

Then notice the judgment list. In Harris County it barely cleared the random house. In Duval it fell below it: fewer than 1 of every 100 owners with a judgment against them sold off-market within 12 months, against fewer than 2 of every 100 houses picked at random. Same list, two counties, two verdicts.

The lists that just sit there

Foreclosures and expired listings start on a date. Something got filed. Vacant houses, back taxes, high equity and owners who live somewhere else work differently. Those owners can sit on a list for years, and most of them never sell.

Some of those lists still beat a random house. In Harris County, about 3 of every 100 vacant houses sold off-market within 12 months, against about 1 of every 100 houses picked at random.

In Duval, owners five or more years behind on their taxes did better still: about 7 of every 100 sold off-market within 12 months, though only 348 owners were on that list.

One standing list loses almost everywhere: owners 65 and older who live somewhere else. In Harris County, fewer than 1 of every 100 of them sold off-market within 12 months, less than a house picked at random.

Houston is typical here. Across the 384 counties where we could measure it, that list sold off-market less often than a random house in 343.

Vacant houses go the other way. They sold off-market less often than a random house in only 5 of 281 counties measured.

High equity is mixed: owners with high equity living elsewhere fell below the random house in 197 of 543 counties, about a third. Equity tells you what a deal is worth. It's a weak clue about who is selling.

How to count your own county

You can do this yourself. It takes a weekend and a spreadsheet.

1. Pull every deed recorded in your county over the last year and keep the arm's-length sales that never went through an agent's listing.
2. For each list you mail, or are thinking about mailing, count how many of those houses were on it before they sold.
3. Divide by the number of owners on the list and multiply by 100. That's how many of every 100 sold.
4. Do the same for every house in the county. That's the line every list has to beat.

Or skip the weekend. The free county read runs this count for your county from the county's own records and shows you which lists sold off-market last year.

What to do with the answer

Mail the lists at the top of your county's table. Drop the ones under the random-house line. Put the money you save into more letters to owners who are actually selling. That's fewer wasted stamps and more calls from people who want out.

Then watch the clock. A list that sells can still be mailed at the wrong time: expired listings sell early and foreclosure filings usually sell late. When to mail each list walks through that with Cook County's numbers. If you stack lists, some stacks help and some hurt; list stacking covers which.

And if you'd rather not run this count every month yourself, here's how the different lead services compare, including ours.

How we counted

We counted every off-market, arm's-length sale recorded in the county after each filing, for filings from October 2024 through March 2025. Lists that sit there, like vacant houses or back taxes, and the house picked at random are counted over 12 months. Probate and divorce are left out: there are too few on record in most counties to measure honestly.

Every number here is counted from the county's own records. The numbers were counted by FirstPulse, the data engine GoForClose runs on.