Which lists are actually worth calling
Almost every article about lead lists is published by somebody who sells lead lists. This one is not. What follows is what changed the numbers on a desk that placed 3,101 calls in fifteen weeks, and what did nothing.
The only two things that matter
A list is worth calling if it satisfies two conditions. Everything else is noise.
- Something happened to this person recently. Not to the property. To the person.
- The phone number is right.
That second one embarrasses people, so nobody writes about it. A list with a 40% correct number rate is not a worse list than one at 80%, it is half a list, and you will conclude the segment is bad when what was bad was the data.
The tiers
Worth calling every week. Probate, divorce, pre foreclosure, code violations, tired landlord with an eviction filing. All of these share the property that an event forced the owner to think about the asset. You are not creating motivation, you are arriving after it appeared.
Worth calling in volume. Absentee owner with high equity, long ownership tenure, out of state. Nothing has happened, so your hit rate is lower, but the pool is enormous and the deals that come out are cleaner because nobody is in crisis.
Mostly a waste. Generic "motivated seller" lists bought as a bundle, anything scraped from a site that also sells to a thousand other people the same morning, and vacant lists with no equity filter. Vacancy without equity is a person who cannot sell, not a person who will not.
The thing nobody tells you about stacking
Stacking lists is good advice that turns bad fast. Two or three overlapping signals is real: absentee plus high equity plus tenure means somebody who has owned it a long time, does not live there, and could actually transact.
Five or six stacked filters produces a list of forty perfect leads and a false sense that you are being efficient. Forty leads is a Tuesday. You cannot build a business on a list you exhaust in a day, and the discipline you learn calling a big imperfect list is what makes you good.
How to judge a list in one week
Do not judge on deals. Deals are too rare and too slow to tell you anything inside a week. Judge on these, in order:
- Wrong number rate. Above 30% and the data is your problem, not the segment.
- Connect rate on correct numbers. Twenty seconds or longer counts as a connect. Anything shorter is a ring out or a hangup, and counting those is how people convince themselves they are connecting on 90% of calls.
- Conversations per hundred dials. Sixty seconds or longer. This is the number that predicts deals.
- Appointments per conversation.
On a healthy list at our desk, a hundred dials produces roughly fifty connects at twenty seconds and around twenty four real conversations. If your conversation rate is under ten per hundred and your numbers are correct, the list is wrong or the opener is.
Skip tracing is not optional
If you take one thing from this: the cheapest improvement available to most desks is not a better list, it is better numbers on the list they already have. Re tracing an existing list usually beats buying a new one, and it costs less.
What we actually run
A large absentee and equity base as the everyday engine, and event lists layered on top as they appear. The event lists produce the deals. The big list produces the reps, and the reps are what make you good enough to close the events when they come.