If you ask a wholesaler who has been doing this for five years what their best converting list is, probate comes up almost every time. There is a reason. Most distressed sellers have to be convinced to sell. Heirs already want to.
What probate leads actually are
When someone dies owning real estate, that property becomes part of their estate. The estate goes through probate, which is the legal process for paying off debts, settling taxes, and transferring assets to heirs. Probate filings are public record in almost every US county.
A probate lead is a property attached to an estate that is currently going through this process or has recently come out of it. The named heir or executor is usually the contact you want. They have legal authority to sell, they did not personally live in the house, and they often live in a different city.
That distance matters. Someone who lives 800 miles from a house they just inherited is not going to fly back to mow the lawn. They are going to want it gone.
Why heirs sell faster than other distressed sellers
Compare a probate seller to a pre-foreclosure seller. The pre-foreclosure homeowner is emotionally tied to the house, often in denial about the financial situation, and frequently shopping for any option that lets them keep it. Conversations are long, emotional, and often end with them choosing the bank workout instead.
Heirs are different. The house is an asset, sometimes a complicated one (two siblings disagree, an attorney is involved, there is unpaid property tax), but rarely a home. The decision is logistical, not emotional. Once you are talking to the right person and the offer is fair, things move.
This is why probate close rates run 4 to 8 percent of contacts, compared to 1 to 2 percent for cold absentee mail. Fewer leads, but each one is worth far more.
Where the records live
Probate records are filed at the county level, usually in a court called Probate Court, Surrogate Court, Orphans Court, or sometimes just the Circuit Court depending on the state. The naming is annoyingly inconsistent.
A few patterns worth knowing:
- In Texas and California, most counties have online probate case search portals. You can pull recent filings by date range without leaving your desk.
- In Pennsylvania (Orphans Court) and New York (Surrogate Court), online access varies wildly by county. New York City counties are mostly online; rural counties may require an in-person request.
- Florida publishes most probate dockets through their statewide court site, though you have to know the case type codes.
- Smaller counties in any state may still index probate filings only on paper, which means a physical trip or a paid records-puller service.
The other half of the work is matching the deceased person's name to a property. Some counties make this easy by including the property address in the probate filing. Most do not. You match by cross-referencing the decedent's name against the county tax assessor records to find what they owned.
Doing this for one county is a weekend project. Doing it consistently across the counties you want to work is the actual job, which is part of why services like ours exist.
When to make first contact
Too early and the family is still planning the funeral. Too late and three other investors have already called. The sweet spot is roughly 60 to 180 days after the initial probate filing. By then the executor has a sense of the estate's situation, the attorneys have started moving, and the heirs are starting to think about logistics.
Skip the first 30 days. It is the right thing to do, and you will not close anything in that window anyway because nobody has legal authority to sign yet.
The first call script that does not get you hung up on
Here is what does not work:
"Hi, I saw your mother passed away and I'd like to make you a cash offer on her house at 123 Oak Street."
This is the version that ends up on Reddit threads about scummy investors. The seller is correct to hang up.
Here is what works better:
"Hi, this is [Name] with [Company]. I'm reaching out because I work with families managing estates in [County] and I wanted to see if you've thought about what to do with the property on [Street Name]. No pressure either way, I know these things take time."
Three things this does. It identifies you. It demonstrates you know something about their situation without being a creep about the death. It signals you understand the timing is not their decision alone. The hang-up rate on this version is roughly half of the first one.
If they engage, the next question is: who else has authority on this? Is there a sibling, an attorney, a personal representative? You want to know early because if you spend an hour building rapport with someone who cannot sign, you have wasted the call.
Common mistakes that get you blocked
Texting before you have spoken on the phone. Probate is a sensitive context and a cold SMS reads as predatory in a way that a phone call does not. Call first.
Mentioning the deceased person by name in your first sentence. It feels intrusive even when your intent is to confirm you have the right contact. Refer to "the property" or "the estate" instead.
Following up more than once a week. This is not a normal sales cadence. Heirs are dealing with grief and legal logistics simultaneously. Aggressive follow-up gets you reported to whoever is sympathetic at the county recorder's office, and they can make your life harder than you think.
Lowballing the first offer because "they just want it gone." Some heirs do. Others have done research and will throw you out for an offer that insults the property. Anchor your offer to recent comparable sales and explain how you got there.
Doing this without scraping court websites yourself
If you want to work probate leads but do not want to build a county-by-county scraping pipeline, that is what Legacy Leads exists for. We pull probate filings, match them to properties, enrich with current owner contact info (the heir, not the deceased), and deliver fresh leads daily across 500+ counties.
You can create a free account, browse the counties you actually work, and see live counts. The probate volume per county varies a lot; some counties produce 40 to 80 probate filings per month, others produce 4 to 5. The dashboard shows you the real numbers before you commit to anything.
Bottom line: probate leads convert better than almost any other type because the seller is rational and motivated. If you are doing wholesale and not working this list, you are leaving deals on the table.