Guide
How to find divorce leads for real estate
Last reviewed August 2026
How do real estate agents find divorce leads?
Divorce leads come from new dissolution filings in county family or circuit court, which are public records in most states. Agents source them by searching the county or statewide court portal directly, or by subscribing to one of the few vendors that sell divorce filings. Far fewer sell divorce than probate. The bottleneck is that many states publish family-court case indexes while sealing or redacting the underlying documents and party addresses, so the filing often gives you two names and a date and nothing that tells you which house is theirs. Matching the filing to the marital home is the entire job.
Why divorce leads are underserved
The probate lead market has a long list of vendors. Divorce has very few, and the reason is structural rather than a lack of demand: probate filings routinely name an executor with an address, while family-court records are the most privacy-restricted civil records in most states. Several states seal matrimonial documents entirely and publish only the index.
That makes divorce harder to build a product around, and it also means less competition for the agents who do work it.
Where the filings live
Divorce is filed in county family or circuit court, and access varies more than any other case type. Some states run a single free statewide portal covering every county. Others fragment across dozens or hundreds of county systems. A few restrict family law from remote access altogether, leaving only courthouse terminals.
Even where the index is open, what you get differs: party names and filing dates are usually visible, party addresses often aren't, and the documents are frequently sealed. Check your state before assuming a workflow exists.
The matching problem is worse than probate
In probate you're usually looking for one decedent's property. In divorce you have two parties, either or both of whom may be on title, and the marital home is the asset in dispute, which is exactly why it often sells.
That two-party structure is also the best disambiguator available. A parcel co-owned by both named parties is close to unique in a way a single common name never is. Where a court publishes a party address, match on the address and never on a name search.
Timing and tone
Divorce leads decay fast in a way probate leads don't. A filing from this week is a household actively deciding what to do with the house; a filing from six months ago has often already listed, sold, or resolved. If a vendor can't tell you the filing date, that's a real problem.
Tone matters more here than in any other lead type. You are contacting someone during the worst month of their year, about the largest asset they own, on the basis of a public record they may not realise is public. Agents who do well in this niche lead with usefulness (a valuation, an explanation of how a court-ordered sale works) and never with urgency.