The Seller Lead Generation Strategy Nobody's Talking About

Real estate investing is an industry where having an edge in uncovering motivated sellers will put you ahead of the curve. A friend of mine named John, who is a real estate investor mentioned that he’s always looking for new ways to find seller leads for his business. Since I have an interest in real estate, I offered to help.

After some research, I came up with an idea that sounds simple, yet most aren't doing it. I use Zillow housing data to uncover property trends that can predict the motivation of sellers for off-market deals.

Leveraging On-Market Data to Uncover Off-Market Opportunities

Zillow’s open source data is easy to access, with lots of free files to download right off of the website, and the best part–it's all free. I wanted to use on-market data as an indicator to identify off-market motivated sellers.

If a market trends in the direction of having more listings than the previous few months, it suggests a shift towards a buyers market, where sellers face more competition, resulting in more room for buyers to negotiate. As listings increase, so does the average time on the market, which can result in sold listing prices to decrease.

This means off-market sellers in the same area may also be more flexible on price, making them open to discounted cash offers.

Identifying Cities with Significant Increases in Active Listings

To identify potential markets for off-market deals, I pulled data from Zillow with the following criteria:

• For-sale inventory

• Single-family residences

• Data organized monthly

• Changes over the last three months (10/31/24 → 1/31/25)

Analyzing Data in Excel: Using Formulas and Sorting Techniques

After downloading the data from Zillow, I created a new column to calculate the percent change in for-sale inventory for each city.

Using a simple percent change formula in Excel, I can measure the change over the last three months to identify the areas with the largest increases. Once the calculations are complete, I could then sort the data from highest to lowest percent change, allowing me to quickly pinpoint the cities experiencing the most significant inventory growth.

Top 10 Cities with the Largest Increase in Listings

After analyzing the data, these were the top cities with the highest percent increase in for-sale listings over the past 90 days:

1. Naples, FL: 37%

2. Richmond, IN: 35%

3. North Port, FL: 34%

4. Punta Gorda, FL: 32%

5. Key West, FL: 30%

6. Cape Coral, FL: 29%

7. Hope, AR: 28%

8. Bainbridge, GA: 26%

9. Arcadia, FL: 24%

10. Deming, NM: 21%

    
    

Why Does an Increase in Listings Matter?

A rise in for-sale inventory doesn’t guarantee an off-market deal, but it is a great indicator.

Several other factors regarding the distress of each individual homeowner are important to consider, but data analysis like this can help investors identify areas where sellers may have higher motivation to sell.

If you're looking for your next off-market deal, check out Zillow’s open data portal to pull market trends and run a similar analysis.

Conclusion

Using Zillow data to track market trends is a powerful way to identify areas where off-market opportunities may exist. By analyzing increases in for-sale inventory, investors can pinpoint locations where sellers are facing more competition and may be more open to negotiation.

While an increase in listings alone doesn’t guarantee motivated off-market sellers, it provides a valuable starting point for targeted marketing and outreach. Applying this approach to your marketing each month can give you a strategic edge in finding motivated sellers.

As the real estate industry becomes more mainstream with lots of new people looking to join every day, leveraging publicly available data like this can be a game-changer for those looking to get ahead in the industry.

As for John, he informed me that he has been using this strategy for years to generate off-market leads for his business!