How to Find Expired Real Estate Listings

This is a great topic to discuss and I love the subject because there is so much money to be made on focusing on expired listings. Here is something most people don’t realized. If you are focusing on expired listings, then chances are you are one of two or three types of agents. You might be a brand new agent and are being advised to focus on expired listings first. You might be a mid-level agent and want to push your business to the next level and by adding expired real estate listings you can get more listings. Or, you could be like a friend of mine, one of our clients, who focuses on expired listings as part of his overall business process. He makes a few hundred thousand a year on expired listings alone.

How Do You Find Expired Real Estate Listings and What Do You Do with Them?

There are several ways to find expired real estate listings. You can do it on your own or hire a company to do it for you. The data is going to be the same. Your overall impact is going to be roughly the same. The difference is in how much “automation” you want to put into it.

Hire a Company

Let’s talk about the easiest way to find real estate listings. This is going to be to pay someone to do it for you. There are a number of companies out there. The ones we’ve heard the most about from our clients are Landvoice and RedX. Both will do generally similar things in terms of helping you identify expired real estate listings. Check with both to find out what the differences are, especially in services they offer to help you follow up. The overall process is fairly simple. With both companies you’ll select a zip code where you want to find expired real estate listings. The company you choose will tie into your MLS, pull up all the data of all expired real estate listings that are still expired and put them into a database. They will typically try to match the information with another database that will try to append the phone number and email address so you have contact information. Then, you can begin to follow up with the expired listings. The system will keep that database clean and updated. You’ll be given a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) to manage your follow up. The system acts as a sort of expired real estate listings program in a box. It can be very effective.

Do It Yourself

If you don’t want to pay a company to do the work you can quite easily do it yourself. Go to your MLS, bring up a list of all of your expired listings in the area you would like to farm. You can do it by region, by zip code, by subdivision and possibly even by home types or home pricing. That’s what my friend does. He has a specific niche that he focuses on with expired listings. He tells his MLS to look for that niche and email him every day an expired listing comes up that fits those parameters. Then, he looks up each listing and decides if it’s a listing he wants to pursue or not. If he pursues it, what does he do next? He floats it to an Excel spreadsheet. Now he has an entire list that he has built and continues to build of expired listings that meet the exact parameters he is looking to focus on and that he has personally reviewed as soon as they delisted. This is one of the simple ways on how to find expired real estate listings.

What Do You Do with Expired Real Estate Listings You’ve Identified?

In addition to learning how to find expired real estate listings, the next biggest question and probably a bigger question for you to answer is what are you going to do with expired real estate listings once you find them? How do you plan to follow up? Let me encourage you to find our previous blog as we talked on “How to get listings with expired real estate listings.” What can you do to build a list of expired real estate listings so homeowners start calling you when they are ready to sale? It’s a great blog with lots of information. Click on it here.