Expired Lead Research: How Time is Money for Real Estate Agents

Updated June 2026 – REDX Publishing Team

Every expired listing starts as a name and an address. Turning that into a lead you can actually call means hunting down a phone number, checking whether the home already relisted, and scrubbing the number against the Do Not Call list. Done by hand, that work takes 10 to 15 minutes per lead, and all of it happens before you say a single word to a seller.

Stretch that out across a month of expired listings and you lose hours that should have been spent on the phone. The real question about expired lead research is not whether it needs to happen, it is whether you should be the one doing it.

This post breaks down what manual expired lead research truly costs in 2026, what that time is worth in real dollars, and how REDX agents spend those hours instead.

Co-authored by the REDX Publishing Team and:

Tyler Fenn

Tyler Fenn is the lead trainer with REDX Academy and a real estate agent actively in production.

Learn about Academy

How Long Does Expired Lead Research Take by Hand?

About 10 to 15 minutes each, and a good chunk of that time produces nothing usable. The manual process usually runs through these steps:

1. Pull the day’s expired listings from the MLS.
2. Cross-check them against active listings so you are not calling a home that already relisted.
3. Match the address to tax records to find the homeowner’s name.
4. Run the name through phone and people-search sources to find a number.
5. Cross-check every number against the Do Not Call list before you dial. REDX recommends agents avoid dialing numbers on the Do Not Call list.

Colby Parker, a REDX agent, described his old routine this way:

“I’d have to go to my MLS and export all of the expired listings… then I’d have to skip trace them, get the phone numbers. Then I’d have to run that number through the Do Not Call Registry to make sure I’m staying TCPA compliant… then I’d have to manually call them.”

Another agent, Kamal Salim, put real math to it.

“Each one of those will take 10, 15, 20 minutes to research… that’s four properties an hour. In a day you can only research six or seven.”

A morning of research can leave you with a handful of numbers and no conversations.

What Is That Research Time Actually Costing You?

Far more than the price of any tool. Every hour spent researching expired leads is an hour not spent in the listing conversations that actually pay you.

Seller-side work pays. According to independent audits, agents earn roughly $1,456 per hour working seller leads, compared to about $320 per hour on buyer leads. Hours spent researching are hours you are not earning at that top rate. (See our breakdown of buyer vs. seller leads.)

Thomas Phelan, another REDX customer, ran the numbers on his own prospecting:

“When I look at my $40,000 commission and I divide that by the actual time on the phone I was talking, it is well over $1,000 an hour.”

Hector Perez reached the same conclusion the hard way, noticing he “was losing my time on the other… much higher income producing activities” while he did low-value clerical work himself.

When your dialing hour is worth four figures, spending it on tax records and reverse phone lookups is the most expensive habit in your business.

How Do Top Agents Spend That Time Instead?

They skip that manual research entirely and start their morning with the data already in front of them, then dial. The research step is handled, so the whole hour goes to live conversations.

With reliable phone numbers loaded and a Power Dialer sequentially dialing the list, agents move from one call to the next in seconds instead of punching numbers between dials. The difference shows up in raw volume. According to real REDX customers…

• Eric Lichterman: “You can make 300 phone calls in a matter of two hours… versus punching the numbers and making 50 phone calls in three hours.“
• John Pidgett: “I can go from calling, like, 40 people in three hours to, like, calling 200 people now.“
• Eddie McGowan: “I could not physically sit there and call 300 people. It’s out of the question. But REDX and the dialer gives me that ability.“

The data quality matters as much as the speed. REDX customer Michael Downer noted that “having accurate information came in very handy. Obviously, it takes a lot of time to find that information, and REDX makes it easy.”

Accurate contact data means fewer dead numbers and more real connections per hour.

Does Faster Prospecting Actually Lead to More Listings?

Yes, because expired listing leads convert and the math compounds in your favor. According to REDX MLS tracking data, 43% of expired listings relist within 90 days, with a 45-day average relist window, and REDX seller leads convert at 22.8% in a study of 2.7 million leads.

The agents who protect their phone time see it pay back fast.

Kenyon Lowe said he and his partner “paid ourselves back for the cost of the purchase for REDX within… 45 days’ time.”

Paula Burlison, who books $522,000 GCI and 43 listings a year with more than 40% coming from expired listings, treats her database as long-term income:

“It’s an annuity that renews every year and pays me a quarter of a million dollars every year, year after year.”

Kayla Dieppa, who grew from $7M in her first year to $14M, framed the trade most plainly:

“The time that I get back that you can’t pay for… will always trump the amount of money that I can’t make.”

What Should You Do With the Hours You Get Back?

Run your own prospecting math before tomorrow morning, then decide where your time belongs. Use this quick check:

1. Count your expired lead research time. Track how long you spend each morning building a call list by hand. Multiply by your working days to see the monthly total.
2. Price the hour. Compare that time against the roughly $1,456 per hour seller-lead rate. That gap is your real cost.
3. Move the clerical work off your plate. Start with data that is ready to call, so step one of your day is dialing, not searching.
4. Protect a daily dialing block. The winners above guard two to three hours a day for live calls and refuse to trade it for busywork.
5. Reinvest the time in follow-up. Expired sellers relist fast, so the agent who calls first and follows up wins the appointment.

Funny enough, we wrote this article more than 10 years ago. At the time, social media was taking off, and agents were still discussing whether or not getting leads was worth it. More than 13 years later, the core concept still applies. In real estate, time is money. The agents winning today are the agents still putting in the work and investing their time in money-making activities like prospecting and lead generation. When you hand off expired lead research and stop hunting phone numbers, those hours go straight into listings.