Can’t I Get Expireds From My MLS?

One question we receive fairly often from agents who are new to prospecting is, “Can’t I get expireds from my MLS?” The answer is yes you can get an expired listing, NO you can’t get an expired lead. The difference between the two is better understood by learning what the MLS provides and what REDX can do.

Expired Leads VS Expired Listings

When a listing expires on the MLS it is not uncommon to have missing or incomplete homeowner name, phone number, addresses, property status of owner occupied or not etc. And if the expired listing does come with any of those data tidbits, how do you know the last agent didn’t replace the contact information with their own to throw their competition off the trail? Yes, the MLS has all the expired listings, but that is just the first piece of the puzzle.
For an average agent to prospect from the MLS expireds it would require an extensive amount of time and a lengthy process.

How to Get Homeowner Information for Expired Listings

Here’s a hypothetical to do list on how to verify the homeowner information for one expired address on your MLS:

1. Starting with only the address, someone would have to look up the address in the tax records to see who the actual homeowner is.
2. Once the name is obtained there, the agent would then need a phone number. That means taking the name to sources like Whitepages or 411.
3.  Many times the phone number isn’t there so an agent would then need to google the homeowner to see if they could find their number on Facebook or Linkedin or some other website.
4. After gathering up all the numbers to be had, it’s time to go check them against the do-not-call list one by one.
5.  Finally, you need to take one last step by going back to the MLS to see if the property has relisted in the time that it’s taken you to find the contact information.

This process can take an agent anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes on 1 lead. Does the average agent have the time to do this with even just 5 or 6 expireds every day? Not likely. This is where  REDX comes in.
Using REDX we can do all the research that the average agent did above and go waaay deeper by scouring tax records, public records, consumer data, and proprietary data in literally two to three minutes.  So your time is free to spend actually prospecting like an agent should instead of playing detective.