Guide
How to get probate leads as a real estate agent
Last reviewed August 2026
How do real estate agents get probate leads?
Agents get probate leads in four ways: reading new estate filings at the county courthouse or its online portal themselves (free, but slow and manual), buying a county list from a probate lead vendor (typically a monthly subscription quoted per county), buying predicted-inheritance leads from a modelling service, or subscribing to a monitoring service that watches the court record and matches each filing to the property before delivering it. The real difference between them isn't price: it's how much qualifying work lands on you. A raw filing gives you a name; turning that name into the right person, and that person into a property they actually own, is the work that decides whether the lead is worth calling.
Start at the source: what a probate filing actually contains
When someone dies owning property, an estate is opened in the county's probate court. The filing names the decedent and the personal representative (the executor or administrator handling the estate) and carries a filing date. Depending on the state, it may also carry a street address for one or both of them.
That last detail decides almost everything downstream. A filing with an address tells you which specific person you're looking at and lets you match the property directly. A filing with only names leaves you guessing, because names collide constantly: any county of size has several people sharing a common name.
The four sourcing routes, compared
Each route trades money for time, and coverage for verification.
- Do it yourself. Visit the courthouse or work the county's online portal. Free apart from your time, and you learn the local record inside out. It doesn't scale past a county or two, and you'll be doing the property matching by hand.
- County list vendors. A monthly subscription, usually quoted per county rather than published as a rate card, delivering that county's new probate filings. Broadest coverage. Some vendors reach all 50 states using human researchers. Property matching is typically an add-on you pay for separately.
- Predictive services. These model who is likely to have inherited, using death, obituary, and property data, and sell leads in fixed monthly bundles. They can surface a likely inheritance before any case is filed, but you're buying a probability rather than a filed case, and you can't audit a confidence score.
- Monitoring services. These watch the court or clerk record daily, resolve the filing party to a real person, check title evidence, and deliver a scored lead. Narrower coverage, because they can only operate where the record carries enough to pin an identity, but far less qualifying work left to you.
The mistake that wastes the most time
The most common failure isn't picking the wrong vendor: it's treating a name match as a property match. An agent pulls a probate filing for "JOHN SMITH", searches the county assessor for a John Smith, finds one, and calls about a house that belongs to a completely different John Smith.
Before you call, you want at least one thing beyond the name that pins the individual: a street address on the record, a date of birth or date of death, or a co-party whose name also appears on title. Without one of those, you're working a coin flip and you'll burn goodwill on wrong numbers.
Timing: when probate leads are worth calling
Probate is slow, which is both the problem and the opportunity. A typical estate takes months to move through court, and the decision to sell rarely comes in week one. But the personal representative is usually appointed early, and that's the person who will eventually choose the agent.
Reaching them early (with something genuinely useful rather than a pitch) is what wins the listing later. The practical implication for sourcing: freshness matters less for probate than for divorce, but knowing the filing date still matters, because it tells you where in the process the family is.