John Nigro has spent nine years building a Connecticut real estate business on a lead type most agents skip twice. First they skip FSBOs because they expect to get yelled at. Then they skip the older ones because a two-year-old listing feels dead. Those homeowners get his favorite prospecting hour of the week.
Old FSBO leads are homeowners who tried to sell without an agent and came off the market two or more years ago. John calls them because almost nobody else does. “They’re getting very, very few phone calls,” he says. “They’re probably getting about one to two phone calls per week at most, maybe less than that.” Compare that with a fresh expired listing, where a homeowner can field a dozen calls in a morning.
Here is what makes the old list worth your time, how John screens it before he dials, and the opening he uses to keep a stranger on the phone.
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Because three things are true about that list, and each one works in your favor.
The odds also favor patience with this group. According to REDX MLS tracking data, 38% of FSBOs end up listing with an agent and 88% use an agent in some capacity before the sale is done. REDX’s 2.7 million lead study puts FSBO lead conversion at 15.0%. A homeowner who insisted two years ago that they had it handled has had two years to change their mind.
If this sounds familiar, it is the same logic behind working aged expireds. Our old expired listing strategy runs the same play on the other side of the market.
Spend five minutes removing the homes that already sold. John does this every session:
Screening does more than save embarrassment. It means every conversation you start has a live premise, which changes how you sound in the first 10 seconds. Before you dial anything, REDX recommends agents avoid calling numbers on the Do Not Call list; our agent’s guide to the DNC list and TCPA covers what applies to your calls.
Open with the diagnosis. John’s mindset shift changed his motive first, and that changed his script.
“I had to shift out of the mindset of, oh, they’re going to yell at me and curse me out on the phone,” he says. “And instead approach it from a perspective of, they need help, something’s wrong, how can I help them? This is my job to fix it.”
In a market that has favored sellers since 2020, an unsold home points to a specific cause. John’s shortlist is pricing, exposure, or something legal tied to the title. That gives you a real reason to call.
“Look, I’m here to help. I saw that your house was on the market before, I saw that it didn’t sell, and I’m just trying to figure out if there’s anything that we can do or review together to maybe find you a little bit better of a result.”
Compare that with a commission-first opener, which he says gets an instant brush-off: “I’ve heard that all before. I don’t want it.” That posture has to hold through the whole conversation and into the first meeting, so the seller knows where you stand before the home ever goes live. “This guy or this gal is here for me. They got my back.”
Use one as a template. The best prospecting advice John ever received was “to use scripts as a template and not a tool,” which is his way of saying the page holds your checkpoints while the conversation stays yours.
What he does inside that structure is mirror the person. A rough-and-tough investor wants to know who you are, why you called, and then get off the phone. A homeowner selling because they lost their job needs a different pace.
“If I’m calling somebody who’s selling a house because they lost their job and they just simply can’t afford the mortgage, and I have the same demeanor as a very fast New Yorker just trying to get business done, then we’re not going to meld correctly to build that relationship,” he says. “You really need to be able to put on a lot of different hats.” Our guide on when to use cold calling scripts and when to let them go gets into how to hold both at once.
You make prospecting the job and treat client service as the work that follows it. John came from a salaried world, and his first year exposed how brutal full commission feels. One transaction died 10 days before closing over the buyer’s financing, with the closing date already on his calendar.
That could have soured him on the model. Instead he reframed it: full commission is the motivation to keep the funnel full, so a collapsed deal becomes an inconvenience he can absorb. That couple did buy, about 18 months later, a different house in a different year.
“Prospecting is the job. Client service is the supplemental job. I know client service, I know the houses that I’ve listed, I know what my buyers are looking for. The unknown is the prospecting.”
His early lead source was the usual one: sphere, family, friends, colleagues, open house visitors, and past clients, who in his region tend to change their living situation every five to seven years. It worked until it ran out. “There’s only so many times you can call your aunt and ask if she’s interested to buy or sell.”
A purchased list solved the arithmetic. “Your consistency of income is in your consistency of prospecting,” he says, and with tens of thousands of names available he stopped running out of people to call. His comparison for a lead source is deliberately unromantic: “It’s the oil for your car. It’s the electricity for your house.” You can be a skilled negotiator and take great photos and still hit a wall at a few hundred contacts.
John prospects three to four days a week and defends the rest of the calendar. A dedicated office puts him in the right headspace, he protects real days off, and he takes several vacations a year so the effort has a visible payoff. “Make sure that you’re balancing your work and your leisure time in a way that keeps you motivated, so that when you come into the office to do your prospecting, you have a vision of the kind of quality of life that you’re looking for.”
The Power Dialer is his favorite REDX feature for a reason that has nothing to do with speed. Hand dialing gave him five to ten seconds of dead air between calls, and he filled it with self-doubt about whether the next person would yell at him. Sequential dialing removes the gap. “You don’t really have time to get in your head, and that I promise you is a great thing.”
Sort every new lead by urgency, then let the plan run. A monthly call is far too rare for a homeowner deciding between agents this week, and it is intrusive for someone who told you they are two years out.
That last habit doubles as a listing presentation. Buyers see you working the phones for them, and sellers hear that you are calling their neighborhood, since in close-knit suburbs someone usually knows a person looking to move nearby. Most of his sellers are also buyers, so the same calls serve both sides of their move.
Block 90 minutes this week and run it in this order.
One last piece of perspective from John, aimed at anyone discouraged by a slower market. Plenty of agents who started during the frenzy have gone part-time or left. He reads the current market as the opening: “This is where your professionalism, your help, your authenticity has a time to shine.” A homeowner whose house sat unsold for two years is a good place to prove it.