Where Top Agents Find Seller Leads in 2026

By Katie Taylor & James Goodman

With a combined 30 years of experience in the real estate industry, Katie and James lead the Goodman Taylor Team, one of the top-performing teams in the Greater Phoenix area.

If you need more listings, you need more conversations with people who are thinking about selling. And in 2026, the data to find those people exists. You don’t have to guess who might be ready to sell. You can look it up. The question is whether you know where to get the data and what to do with it once you have it.

Right now, over 78,000 listings are expiring off the MLS every single week. That’s up 83% from two years ago. On top of that, you’ve got homeowners sitting on record equity, absentee owners with properties they’re considering unloading, and pre-foreclosure situations where sellers need help fast. All of those people are findable.

Here’s how we approach it and how we train the agents on our team to do the same.

1. Know what’s available and where to get it. There are data platforms built specifically for agents who want to prospect likely sellers. Tools like PropStream give you access to property ownership records, equity positions, ownership length, tax history, and over 165 search filters to build custom lists. You can target high-equity homeowners, absentee owners, pre-foreclosures, vacant properties, and more.

REDX focuses on expired listings, FSBOs, pre-foreclosures, and geographic farming leads. Their data shows that 43% of expired listings relist within 90 days, which means nearly half are actively looking for a new agent right now. The point is, the data is accessible. Agents who know where to look have a significant advantage over agents who are waiting for the phone to ring.

2. Buying the list is the easy part. Working it is what matters. This is where most agents drop off. They sign up for a data service, pull a list of 500 names, make a few calls, get some voicemails, and move on. The agents who turn these lists into actual listings treat prospecting like a system, not a one-time effort.

They sort by highest probability first. They call consistently over weeks, not once. Most listings don’t come from the first call. They come from the fourth, fifth, or even twelfth contact. They track everything in a CRM and lead with value on every conversation. If you’re going to invest in the data, you have to invest in the follow-up. The list is the starting point. The system is what produces the results.

3. Don’t ignore the list you already have. While you’re building out your prospecting with data tools, don’t overlook the likely seller list you’ve been building for years: your own database. Past clients who bought three to five years ago are prime candidates for a listing conversation. Old leads sitting in your CRM that haven’t heard from you in months. People in your sphere who’ve had life changes.

These are people who already know you and trust you. A simple check-in call or a home value update could be the conversation that leads to your next listing. The best agents we work with do both: they use the data tools for new opportunities and their database for the relationships they’ve already built.

The agents building the strongest listing pipelines in 2026 aren’t waiting for business to come to them. They’re using data to find likely sellers before anyone else and combining that with the relationships in their existing database.

If you want to build a real listing pipeline but you’re not sure which tools to use or how to work the data once you have it, that’s exactly what we help our agents with. Call us at (480) 382-8093 or email us at james@theeverydayagent.com. You can also visit theeverydayagent.com to learn more about how we support our agents.