The State of Real Estate Prospecting in 2026

The expired pool is the largest in the modern data record. It includes 4.5 million leads delivered in 2025, growing every year, with the broader market refilling it daily. Industry tracking puts the expired list rate at 44% with roughly 30 days to convert [1].

That combination of scale, motivation, and speed makes expireds the irreplaceable foundation of any serious prospecting business.

The Size of the Market

Vulcan7's own delivery data documents the scale of this market directly. The platform delivers a median of roughly 11,000 expired leads on a typical day (and more than 75,000 per week).

Growth Trends

• 2023: 3,310,612 expired leads delivered
• 2024: 4,002,174 (+21%)
• 2025: 4,478,507 (+12%)
• 2026 (Jan–Apr): 1,453,019 (a pace that, if sustained, sets another record)

Year-to-date comparisons through May 1, 2026 confirm the upward trajectory. Across states tracked in Vulcan7's system, expired lead volume for the January–April period was 697,633 in 2026, compared to 628,538 in the same window in 2025: an 11% increase.

The trend is market-wide, not platform-specific. Realtor.com reported delistings up roughly 38% year over year in October 2025, with year-to-date delistings up approximately 45% — and a national delisting-to-new-listing ratio of 0.27, meaning 27 listings were pulled for every 100 that went live. In Miami that ratio reached 45; in Denver, 39.

Notable Shifts in Specific Regions

This growth is not isolated to one geographical area. Year-over-year growth rates reveal where the prospecting opportunity is accelerating fastest:

Some markets saw meaningful declines, including Louisiana (-38%), Kentucky (-34%), and Hawaii (-8%). These likely reflect local inventory and rate dynamics. The highest absolute volumes are concentrated in the largest states, as expected: California led with 127,207 expired leads YTD through April, followed by Florida (112,897), Texas (65,483), Pennsylvania (41,311), and Tennessee (26,913).

The Monthly Surge Pattern

Expired listing volume follows a predictable rhythm. Listings expire disproportionately on the first day of each month (the date on which most listing contracts terminate). Across the Vulcan7 platform, the first of the month reliably produces 3 to 5 times the daily median expired volume. Agents who call these new leads on the same day they land (i.e., the first of the month) get first access to a freshly stocked lead pool that most of their competitors have not yet touched.

That monthly pattern reaches its annual extreme on January 1st:

The January 1st surge has grown every year for which we have captured data. In 2026, 166,031 listings expired in a single day, representing over 15 times the typical daily volume. But it's not just about supply. Data shows that calling these leads early yields results. People answer on New Year's Day. Answer rates on January 1st ran above the annual baseline in both years with available call data: 6.44% vs. a 6.35% baseline in 2025, and 5.98% vs. a 5.66% baseline in 2026.

Other First-of-Month Surges Are Trends, Not One-Offs

The same monthly firsts rank among the year's largest expiration events year after year:

• October 1st: 35,498 leads (2023) → 56,200 (2024) → 66,180 (2025)
• July 1st: 42,466 (2023) → 44,480 (2024) → 59,262 (2025)
• April 1st: 33,013 (2024) → 50,545 (2025) → 54,095 (2026)

Agents who build their calendars around these known inflection points can systematically outperform peers who rely on reactive prospecting.

Why the Volume of Expired Leads Is Growing

The multi-year growth in expired listings reflects a housing market where selling has become genuinely difficult:

• Inventory is up: Active listings hit 1.15 million in March 2025, up 19% year over year.
• Sellers are cutting prices and still missing: 23.5% of March 2025 listings carried a price cut, the highest March share since at least 2018. By October 2025, the median cumulative price cut per reduced listing reached $25,000 (the largest Zillow has ever recorded).
• Buyers hold the leverage: 62.2% of 2025 buyers paid below list price, with an average discount of 7.9% (the largest since 2012).
• Listings are aging out: Roughly 70% of September 2025 listings sat on the market for 60+ days. Many of those sellers delist rather than accept a low offer, and plan to relist in spring.

For Sale By Owner sellers occupy a distinct position in the lead landscape. Unlike expireds, where sellers have already experienced the frustration of a failed listing, FSBOs are sellers who have consciously chosen to avoid working with an agent (at least initially).

That decision is almost always driven by a desire to net more money by cutting out the commission. The data says it rarely works out that way.

FSBO Is at an All-Time Low — and the Math Explains Why

According to NAR's 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers:

Platform Volume Mirrors the National Trend

Vulcan7 delivered 160,038 FSBO leads in 2023, a peak of 169,394 in 2024, and 148,398 in 2025. The first four months of 2026 produced 40,324 (down 22.8% from the same window in 2025). FSBO volume is also far smaller than expired volume. At a national tracking level, expired leads outnumber FSBO leads by roughly 36 to 1.

The Inverse Trend: Fewer FSBOs but More Expireds

FSBO supply is falling over the same window in which expired supply is hitting records. These are two halves of the same story: in a difficult market, fewer sellers attempt the solo route at all. They list with an agent, struggle, and expire.

An Opportunity Your Competition Is Ignoring

Most agents avoid FSBOs because the conversations demand objection handling: why the seller needs an agent, why the commission is worth paying, why a solo sale is unlikely to net more after buyer's agent compensation, marketing costs, and time on market. These conversations require preparation, confidence, and persistence. Many agents lack all three, which means the agents who invest in a consistent FSBO approach face a far less crowded field than the lead type's value would suggest. Industry tracking has found that roughly 38% of FSBOs eventually list with an agent. Most list with whichever agent stayed in touch.

For Rent By Owner leads represent landlords and property owners marketing their rental units independently, without a property manager or real estate agent. They are not listed sellers, but they are property owners. This makes them relevant prospects for agents with an investor-conversion strategy, as well as promising opportunities for repeat business due to tenant turnover.

An effective pitch to these sellers is often straightforward: given current market conditions, would the landlord consider selling rather than continuing to manage a rental?

The Size of the Market

FRBO volume has been the most volatile of the major lead categories:

• 2023: 249,213 leads
• 2024: 406,429 (+63%) — a surge likely reflecting landlords re-evaluating rental assets as rates rose
• 2025: 313,834
• 2026 (Jan–Apr): 124,778 — up 9.5% year over year, signaling renewed landlord exit pressure

The Accessibility Advantage for Phone Prospectors

Across the full dataset, FRBO leads connected at an average rate of 10.6%, which is nearly double the 5.5% rate for expired and off-market leads, and the highest of any major lead category. The gap has narrowed somewhat in recent months, but FRBO remains the most answer-friendly lead type in the dataset as a whole. For agents comfortable with the investor conversation, FRBO leads are among the most efficient uses of dialing time available.

Every first of the month produces a 3-to-5x surge in expired volume as listing contracts terminate together. Agents who block time to call fresh expired leads when they land on the first of the month will systematically outperform those who prospect reactively.

Pre-foreclosure leads are homeowners who have received a notice of default or are otherwise in the early stages of the foreclosure process. The situation is urgent and emotionally charged; an agent who positions themselves as a solution provider rather than a commission-seeker can build significant trust quickly.

The Distress Pipeline Is Growing

According to ATTOM's 2025 Year-End Foreclosure Market Report:

That 592-day figure matters more than it first appears. A homeowner in pre-foreclosure typically has well over a year between first filing and final auction: a long runway during which a knowledgeable agent can provide support, including a potential market sale that protects the owner's remaining equity.

Where Distress Is Concentrated

The highest foreclosure rates in 2025:

Motivated Sellers with Modest Competition

Industry tracking puts the annual re-list rate for pre-foreclosure leads at roughly 15%. This is lower than for expireds, reflecting the complexity and longer timeline of these situations. But the sellers who do engage are highly motivated, and most agents avoid the category entirely because of the emotional difficulty of the conversation. The combination of smaller volume and higher complexity means pre-foreclosure is a supplementary rather than primary category for most agents. But it can also be a valuable one for those who develop the skills to navigate it.

NOTE: Regulations governing outreach to homeowners in foreclosure vary by state or jurisdiction. Agents should familiarize themselves with the applicable requirements in their market before prospecting in this category.

Monday is the best prospecting day (6.16% answer rate), and 11 AM is the best single hour (6.74%). Rates remain elevated through early afternoon, then decline. Agents who protect the 10 AM–3 PM window for focused dialing will achieve better results than those who call when convenient.

Circle prospecting (sometimes called geographic farming or neighborhood prospecting) involves identifying homeowners near a recent sale or active listing and reaching out directly. The logic here is that a sale in someone's neighborhood is a powerful trigger for a homeowner to consider whether it's time to sell their own home.

Unique Data from Vulcan7's Neighborhood Search Feature

Vulcan7's Neighborhood Search tool lets agents identify and dial homeowners within a defined geographic area around a target property. Usage data from the millions of searches powered by this feature provides a rare evidence-driven look into circle prospecting trends.

• 2024: 5,680,782 total searches
• 2025: 4,817,524
• 2026 (Jan–Apr): 1,351,521 (pacing toward roughly 4.05 million for the year)

How Users Are Circle Prospecting

Standard range searches (broad geographic queries around a target address) consistently account for the majority of volume. Enhanced searches, which add filtering criteria, are used less often but represent a more targeted approach to identifying high-probability prospects. This approach allows agents to move away from blindly calling large lists, and towards targeting specific audiences who may be more likely to sell, such as:

• Homeowners living in high-turnover neighbourhoods
• Properties with absentee owners
• Empty nesters who may be ready to downsize
• Owners with significant equity in their properties

Vulcan7's built in skip tracing capabilities are useful here, as they assist agents in finding current contact information for hard-to-reach property owners.

A Slight But Meaningful Advantage

Neighborhood search leads connect at 6.2%, which is ever-so-slightly higher than the platform-wide average of 6.06%. However, this slight edge becomes more valuable when contacting leads at scale, making circle prospecting an important aspect of any agent's overall strategy.

NOTE: As with all outbound prospecting, agents should ensure circle prospecting activity complies with applicable DNC and TCPA requirements.

One of the most practically valuable questions in prospecting is also one of the least often answered with real data: how many dials does it take to reach a live person? The Vulcan7 dataset provides a direct answer based on the recorded outcomes of every call attempt made via the platform.

Across 76.9 million call attempts between January 2024 and April 2026, the platform produced 4,657,043 live connections. That's an overall rate of one live contact every 16.5 dials. However, that average varies meaningfully by lead type. Weighted across the full dataset:

FRBO and FSBO leads are the most accessible by phone, which is unsurprising since both involve owners actively marketing themselves. Expired listings require more dials per connect because these homeowners are no longer advertising and may be more guarded about incoming calls. Probate leads, while valuable for patient prospectors, are the hardest to reach.

Vulcan7's platform data measures lead supply and phone accessibility at a scale no public source can match. What it does not measure is what happens after the conversation: list rates, sold rates, and time to convert. For those benchmarks, this report cites published third-party industry tracking, which has been clearly attributed:

The contrast between the top and bottom of this table is stark.

Supporting context from external research reinforces the urgency of speed: Redfin's analysis of delisted homes found that roughly 18–20% relist within three months. The agent who reaches an expired seller in the first days after expiration is far more likely to be the one chosen at relisting. NAR's finding that 91% of all sales are agent-assisted confirms where nearly every FSBO journey ultimately ends.

Reading Vulcan7 Data Alongside Industry Benchmarks

These datasets measure different things, and they complement rather than compete: Vulcan7 data answers how many leads exist, and how reachable are they. Industry conversion research answers once contacted, how often do they list? Where these datasets converge, the signal is strong: Nebraska ranks highly in industry conversion research and posts the second-highest answer rate in the Vulcan7 dataset. Where they diverge, each adds nuance the other lacks: for example, Louisiana converts well once reached, but Vulcan7's delivery data shows its expired supply shrinking 38% year over year.

Any honest analysis of prospecting performance has to reckon with the alternative: the portal lead economy that has dominated industry spending for the past decade. The numbers are not flattering:

• $181: The average cost of an internet lead in 2026, up 1,107% since 2015
• 0.4%: The national internet lead conversion rate, meaning roughly 250 purchased leads per closing
• ~$45,250: The implied lead spend per closing at those rates, before any time costs
• 24+ months: The typical nurture cycle before an internet lead transacts

By contrast, direct outreach to motivated sellers through expired and FSBO prospecting is estimated to produce $1,200 to $2,250 in value per contact hour. A Vulcan7 subscriber pays roughly $2 to $3 per delivered lead (an internal estimate based on average subscription cost relative to nation-wide lead delivery volume). This is a fraction of the portal cost, and it proves access to sellers who have already self-identified as motivated to transact.

Between January 2024 and April 2026, Vulcan7 platform users made 76,878,081 call attempts, producing 4,657,043 live connections and 5,797,364 voicemails. The overall platform connect rate was 6.06%, with an average of 16.5 dials required per live conversation. In the first four months of 2026 alone, users also sent more than 356,000 outbound prospecting emails via Vulcan7's CRM.

Monthly call volume has grown significantly even as the subscriber base has declined:

Phone answer rates are not uniform across the country. They vary by state, region, and time zone in ways that are consistent across the 28-month dataset. Among states with sufficient call volume for reliable estimates (100,000+ calls), the top performers are:

Meanwhile, the lowest are:

The gap between the extremes is striking. An agent prospecting in Arkansas or Nebraska connects with a live person nearly three times more often per dial than an agent making the same calls in Michigan.

Time zone data adds another layer:

• Mountain time zone states lead all regions at a 7.09% average answer rate
• Central states average 6.37%
• Pacific states lag at 5.47%

Dialer data from Vulcan7 includes a timestamp on every call attempt, making it possible to measure answer rates hour by hour. The following rates are based on Eastern Time Zone call data covering over 37 million calls. The peak prospecting window is 10:00 AM through 3:00 PM. The absolute peak is 11:00 AM at 6.74%.

Rates decline gradually after 3:00 PM as people leave work and transition into evening routines. Evening calling produces meaningfully lower contact rates than midday outreach. Early morning calling (7–8 AM) produces better results than late evening, but below the midday peak. Even so, it's well-known that calling people before the workday starts is an effective prospecting strategy. The same pattern holds in the caller's local time zone, confirming 10 AM–3 PM as an important window wherever the prospect is located.

For decades, serious prospectors have started calling as early as possible because they've long understood that being the first to call matters. This principle still holds true. But this data shows that if you stop making prospecting calls at 9:00 or 10:00 AM (which many agents do) then you're leaving a ton of potential opportunities on the table. Later in the morning, there's less competition from other agents, which can improve your chance of getting someone on the phone.

Day of week is a secondary but meaningful variable. Across 76+ million call attempts:

Key Takeaways:

• Every day of the week is potentially valuable for prospecting, but meaningful differences exist that can help agents optimize their prospecting efforts.
• Monday is the strongest day in both answer rate (6.16%) and efficiency (16.2 dials per connection) as homeowners restart their weekly routines, but the entire workweek presents worthwhile prospecting opportunities.
• Weekdays are stronger than weekends. But since every day of the week shows potential for effective prospecting, the best strategy is still to prospect when you can.
• Sunday is the least efficient day in the dataset (5.26%). Weekend prospectors are better served by Saturday.

The Monday–Sunday gap looks small on paper but becomes more meaningful at scale: 100 dials on Monday yield roughly 6.2 live contacts; the same 100 on Sunday yield about 5.3. Over a full prospecting week, that represents a material difference in opportunities.

Beyond the weekly rhythm, the data identifies calendar events that produce predictably elevated or depressed results. Agents who understand these patterns can front-load activity in high-opportunity windows and adjust effort around predictably slow periods.

The January 1st Opportunity

New Year's Day is the most consequential single date in the prospecting calendar, full stop. As detailed in Section 1.1, January 1st produces the largest single-day expiration event of the year: 166,031 new expired leads in 2026, or 15.2 times typical daily volume. This pattern is consistent across all four years in the dataset.

Answer rates on New Year's Day beat the annual baseline in both years with available call data, and fresh expired leads delivered on January 1st outnumbered every call placed through the platform that day. Agents who dial on January 1st open their year working the largest pool of motivated sellers they will see all year, against the thinnest competition they will face all year. Competitors who take the holiday week off spend early January calling leads that early movers have already worked.

Monthly First-Day Surges

The first-of-month pattern repeats throughout the year at 3 to 5 times the daily median, and the largest monthly firsts recur annually. October 1st, July 1st, and April 1st have ranked among the biggest non-January expiration days in every year of the dataset (see Section 1.1).

Holiday Calling Windows

The data spans two full years of federal holidays and observances. Analyzed against each period's baseline answer rate, it reveals a counterintuitive finding.

Three-Day Weekends Hurt Prospecting Efforts

The Veterans Day and Labor Day windows show the sharpest underperformance, suggesting that three-day weekends (especially in popular travel seasons) are less effective prospecting periods. The Thanksgiving stretch and Memorial Day weekend also underperform.

Cold-Weather Holidays Are Potential Opportunities

By contrast, the MLK Day window, Easter weekend, and the Christmas-to-New-Year's stretch all outperform baseline. While agents take time off in these periods, homeowners are often home, reflective about the year ahead, and more receptive to a conversation about their housing situation.

You Might Not Want to Skip Thanksgiving or Christmas (Eve)

Thanksgiving Day itself is a consistent outperformer: a 7.18% answer rate in 2024 and 6.97% in 2025, both above their annual baselines. Christmas Eve 2024 posted the highest single-day answer rate in the available data, at 7.52%. These are small call-volume days, but homeowners who answer on a holiday are particularly engaged.

Don't Feel Bad for Skipping Christmas & Easter Sunday

The lowest meaningful-volume day in the dataset is Christmas Day 2024 (2.82% on 781 calls). Easter Sunday is consistently below average in all three years captured. These are the days to take off without guilt.

Beyond the raw connect rate, disposition data offers a window into what happens across all call attempts.

Note: approximately 30% of all calls are missing a disposition record, which places some limits on this analysis.

Voicemail Remains Popular

Platform users left 5,797,364 voicemails across the analyzed call records. This underscores the value of leaving voicemail: a homeowner who hears an agent's voice twice (once on a voicemail and once on a live call) has already begun to form an impression before the conversation starts.

Rejection Is Rarer Than Agents Fear

Of the nearly 77 million dials analyzed, only 81,089 (roughly 0.1%) were logged with a "not interested" disposition. For perspective, platform users left roughly 70 voicemails for every explicit "not interested" they recorded. Other negative dispositions, such as "delete contact" and "delete number" were also relatively uncommon (representing 2.2% and 2.0% of all recorded dispositions, respectively). Even allowing for rejections that go unrecorded, this paints a potentially encouraging picture: the outcomes agents fear most are among the rarest outcomes a dial session actually produces.

Every Dial Session Improves the Next One

Roughly 1 in every 22 dials (4.6% of all call attempts) ends in a list-hygiene action: deleting a bad number, flagging a wrong contact, or blacklisting a dead lead. Many agents fear rejection, but this statistic actually suggests that top prospectors should view it as helpful and productive. When you have strong list hygiene routines, every rejection allows you to weed out bad leads and prevent further time from being wasted on them.

As prospecting call volume has grown industry-wide, so has the sensitivity of carrier networks and call-screening applications to dialing patterns that resemble robocall or telemarketing behavior.

What this means: a caller is at risk of having their outbound calls flagged as 'Spam Likely' or 'Scam Risk' by carrier systems, even if they're dialing within all applicable guidelines.

The potential impact: answer rates for flagged numbers drop sharply, because most mobile users do not answer calls displaying a spam warning. An agent who doesn't monitor number health can lose weeks or months of prospecting efficiency without ever knowing why fewer people are picking up.

Most spam-flag triggers relate to call patterns, such as:

• Volume spikes from a given number
• A high proportion of calls that result in no answer
• Short average call duration (which may be caused by hangups)
• Contacts who file complaints or block the number

Since prospecting agents by definition place high volumes of calls, number health management is a critical operational concern for serious prospectors.

Vulcan7's platform includes tools designed to help agents monitor and protect the health of their outbound numbers. The platform currently has 5,055 numbers registered in its system, verified with carriers as legitimate business lines.

The majority of agents using Vulcan7 are not experiencing spam flag issues, but when they do occur, the platform also includes dedicated support to resolve them. Our team remediates directly with the assigning carriers to clear flags and restore the reputation of affected numbers. Between 30 and 50 successful remediations are completed each month.

Safeguarding Responsible Calls from Legitimate Real Estate Agents

It is important to be precise about what number health monitoring and remediation does and does not do. These capabilities protect agents from being incorrectly labeled as spam; they do not protect agents who are actually making improper calls.

If an agent is using deceptive caller ID practices or engaging in other genuinely spammy behaviors, carrier systems will respond accordingly and remediation will not help.

Vulcan7's remediation service exists to protect legitimate prospectors from the collateral damage of carrier algorithms calibrated to catch mass robocalling operations, not to circumvent consumer protection systems.

The expired pool is the largest in the modern data record. It includes 4.5 million leads delivered in 2025, growing every year, with the broader market refilling it daily. Industry tracking puts the expired list rate at 44% with roughly 30 days to convert [1].

That combination of scale, motivation, and speed makes expireds the irreplaceable foundation of any serious prospecting business.

FSBO supply is down to 5% of all sales, an all-time low [6]. But the leads that remain are valuable, and most agents never call them.

The $65,000 median price gap between agent-assisted and FSBO sales [6] represents real value an agent can bring to that conversation. Remember: roughly 38% of FSBOs eventually list with an agent [1]; most list with the agent who stayed in touch.

With an average answer rate of 10.6% (nearly double the expired category) FRBO leads deliver more live conversations per dialing hour than any other lead type in the dataset. The 9.5% year-over-year rebound in FRBO supply suggests landlord exit pressure is building again.

New Year's Day delivers more expired leads than any other day of the year : 166,031 in 2026, up from 102,725 in 2023. These leads land ready to call. Answer rates on January 1st run above the annual baseline, and fresh leads outnumber all platform calls placed that day.

The agents who dial on January 1st work the year's largest pool of motivated sellers against its thinnest competition. This is the most concrete and repeatable first-mover advantage in the residential real estate calendar.

Every first of the month produces a 3-to-5x surge in expired volume as listing contracts terminate together. Agents who block time to call fresh expired leads when they land on the first of the month will systematically outperform those who prospect reactively.

Monday is the best prospecting day (6.16% answer rate), and 11 AM is the best single hour (6.74%). Rates remain elevated through early afternoon, then decline. Agents who protect the 10 AM–3 PM window for focused dialing will achieve better results than those who call when convenient.

Despite the advantages of the Monday to Wednesday window and the 10 AM to3 PM sweet spot, the drop-off outside these hours isn't steep enough to sit on the sidelines. Answer rates hold up well enough across the week and day. The agents who win listings aren't the ones who dial at exactly the right hour. They’re the ones who dial. Make the calls. Have the conversations. Win the listings.

An agent in Nebraska (11.68% answer rate) operates in a fundamentally different prospecting environment than an agent in Michigan (4.25%). Both can build successful phone-prospecting businesses, but the Michigan agent needs to dial more than twice as many numbers to generate the same conversations. Set activity targets that reflect your market's reality, not a national average.

The median agent closed 10 transaction sides in 2024, while the top 20% of agents accounted for 65% of all deals [8][9]. The behaviors in this report (daily dialing, protected calling blocks, first-of-month discipline, clean number health) help account for that gap.

At $181 per lead and 0.4% conversion, portal dependence implies roughly $45,250 in lead spend per closing (before time costs) on a 24-month nurture cycle [2,3].

By contrast, direct prospecting of motivated sellers produces an estimated $1,200 to $2,250 in value per contact hour [3], at a platform cost of roughly $2 to $3 per delivered lead.