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Listings Are the Lifeblood of Your Business — Here’s How to Find Them
Every market is different right now. Some areas are still tight on inventory, while others have finally started rebuilding after years of historic lows. Wherever your market stands, one thing hasn’t changed: listings are what build a real estate career, and finding them takes a deliberate strategy, not luck.
Below are ten proven ways to connect with sellers and earn their listing, whether you’re brand new or just looking to add a few more strategies to your toolkit.
1. Reach out to your sphere of influence (SOI)
You have a ready-made resource of family, friends, former clients, and colleagues that you can tap into with an email, phone call, or cup of coffee. Reach out to your SOI and let them know you’re actively working with buyers, and would love to help them or anyone they know who might be thinking about selling. Keep them informed about their home’s potential value in today’s market and the activity you’re seeing in their neighborhood. For a full system on building and nurturing this list, see our Ultimate Guide to Sphere of Influence.
2. Target FSBO and expired listings
This is consistently one of the highest-converting strategies for finding new listings, and it’s often underused. For Sale By Owner (FSBO) sellers frequently struggle with pricing and marketing their home effectively, and many welcome an experienced agent’s perspective once they’ve hit a wall. Expired listings are even more promising — these are sellers who have already decided to sell and hire an agent, but the previous listing didn’t work out for one reason or another. A specific, honest plan for what you’d do differently goes a long way with this group.
One thing a lot of newer agents don’t realize: your MLS can tell you which listings expired, but it won’t give you the seller’s current phone number or mailing address, and they may have already moved out of the home. This is where a paid lead service like REDX comes in — it aggregates skip-traced contact information for expired listings, FSBOs, and other motivated-seller categories, and automatically screens against the Do Not Call Registry for you. Similar services include Landvoice and Vulcan7. These tools cost money, but they turn a list of addresses into an actual list of people you can call or mail.
3. Reach out to your professional network
Your best bet for finding an off-market or pre-market listing is often a real estate colleague or professional associate. Reach out on a regular basis both within your brokerage and outside it so that you’re always the first to know when something new is becoming available. While you may not always be able to broker a pre-market sale, staying connected gives you a real advantage over agents who only work the open MLS.
4. Connect with new home builders
For many buyers, new home builders offer the best opportunity to find the home they want in their preferred location. Connect with the best custom builders and spec builders in your area and learn about their upcoming projects and purchase process. This is especially valuable if most of your experience is with resales, since it broadens what you can offer buyers and often leads to seller referrals from the same builders.
5. Develop financing options for back-to-back buyer/sellers
Many potential sellers hesitate because they’re worried about buying and selling at the same time. Work with a trusted lender to develop smart solutions that let your clients buy first, then sell after closing (bridge loans, HELOCs, and similar programs). Create simple content — blog posts, videos, or a one-page explainer — that walks sellers through these options in plain language.
6. Create value-added, solution-oriented content
This is a great way to build authority for your blog and/or social media around any part of the home sale process: pricing strategy, staging tips, or a straightforward Q&A about your local market. Each piece is a chance to demonstrate your expertise to potential sellers before they’ve even decided to list. Short, personal video content tends to outperform static posts here.
7. Step up geographic farming
It’s essential to stay top-of-mind with sellers in your geographic farm area. Create current, useful content and share it consistently through direct mail with a QR code, a neighborhood newsletter, or targeted digital ads. Set up MLS auto-alerts for pending sales in your farm area so you’re always the first to reach out with real, specific data (“the house on Maple sold in 6 days for $12,000 over asking”) rather than a generic postcard.
If your farming strategy includes phone outreach (often called circle prospecting), check any list of numbers against the National Do Not Call Registry and be aware of your state’s telemarketing rules first — a compliant dialing platform can screen this for you automatically.
Learn more about how to farm a neighborhood.
8. Run targeted seller-intent advertising
Paid search and social ads aimed specifically at people researching “what’s my home worth” or similar seller-intent phrases can produce real listing leads, even in a tight market, when paired with fast follow-up. This doesn’t have to mean a huge budget — a modest, consistent ad spend with a quick response system often outperforms a large one-time push. Look into sponsorship opportunities at local events too, which build the same kind of visibility over time.
9. Focus on underserved markets or niches
While other agents chase the same larger single-family homes everyone else wants, consider focusing on land sales, condos, or a specific niche no one else in your market is talking to. Look to micro-markets and underserved homeowner types for your next listing. A relevant certification or designation can help you serve these clients with real confidence rather than just enthusiasm.
10. Emphasize relocation services
Remote and hybrid work have made it easier than ever for people to move across the country for lifestyle reasons rather than a job requirement. Look at the migration trends in your market and partner with colleagues in popular destination cities to offer a streamlined experience for sellers who are relocating. Make this a clear differentiator in your marketing rather than an afterthought.
Bonus: Look for media opportunities
Want to raise your profile with buyers and sellers in your area? Connect with journalists, bloggers, and local content creators who cover the markets you serve. HARO (Help a Reporter Out) is one option to connect with journalists — note that it went through a shutdown and relaunch under new ownership (Featured.com) in 2025, so double-check current functionality before relying on it heavily.
Frequently Asked Questions
I’m having a hard time finding listings. What should I do first?
Start with your sphere of influence and expired/FSBO listings — both are lower-cost and higher-conversion than most other strategies, and don’t require any advertising budget. Pick one or two tactics from this list and commit to them consistently for 90 days before adding more; spreading yourself across all ten at once usually produces less than mastering two or three.
Is it still possible to get listings in a low-inventory market?
Yes — low inventory actually makes proactive strategies like FSBO outreach, expired listings, and geographic farming more valuable, since fewer agents are competing for the same visible, on-market opportunities. The agents who struggle most in a tight market are the ones waiting passively for listings to appear rather than going out and finding sellers before they’re ready to list.
How do I find FSBO and expired listings?
Your local MLS can show you expired listings, but it won’t give you current contact information for the seller. That’s the gap a paid lead service like REDX, Landvoice, or Vulcan7 fills — they aggregate skip-traced phone numbers and addresses for expired and FSBO sellers, already screened against the Do Not Call Registry, so you can actually reach out rather than just knowing a listing expired.
Is cold-calling or circle prospecting for listings still legal?
It can still work, but check any phone list against the National Do Not Call Registry and your state’s telemarketing rules before calling, or use a compliant dialing platform that screens for you. Many agents lean more heavily on direct mail and door-to-door outreach specifically to avoid this added complexity.
How long does it take a new agent to get their first listing?
It varies widely, but most new agents shouldn’t expect a listing in their first few weeks — 3 to 6 months of consistent effort is a more realistic timeline, similar to how long it takes to close a first sale of any kind. Sphere of influence outreach tends to produce the fastest first listing for brand-new agents, since it doesn’t require building trust from zero.
Should I spend money on paid ads to find listings, or focus on free strategies first?
If you’re brand new or have a limited budget, master the free strategies first — sphere of influence, FSBO/expired outreach, and content creation cost time rather than money. Paid seller-intent ads work well, but they perform best when you already have a fast follow-up system in place; without one, ad spend is often wasted on leads nobody responds to quickly enough.
What’s the single fastest way to get my first listing as a brand new agent?
Tell everyone you know that you’re now a real estate agent and specifically ask if they, or anyone they know, has thought about selling. It sounds almost too simple, but a direct, personal ask to your sphere of influence converts faster than any other strategy on this list, precisely because the trust is already built.
Have another strategy that’s working for you? We’d love to hear about it!
Please note: This website contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.
