The Challenge: Today’s high interest rates and lack of home inventories have made it much harder to find properties to sell, forcing agents and brokers to look for hidden opportunities.
The Solution: Landvoice has developed a large database of pre-foreclosures and expired listings in the U.S. and Canada and will soon roll out additional datasets on distressed and vacant properties.
The Impact: Landvoice’s databases represent the most comprehensive source of hidden leads, enabling brokers to easily search for properties in their area that are not for sale, but soon might need to be.
In a housing market where it seems nobody wants to move and nobody wants to sell, real estate brokers need to be creative to find business.
Maybe it is re-listing a house that another broker can’t sell. Or maybe it is finding a landlord who can’t find a stable tenant and the property is sitting vacant, or maybe it’s a homeowner trying to sell their home on their own, or perhaps it is a homeowner who has missed a couple of mortgage payments.
But where do you find that home that isn’t necessarily for sale, but is a good candidate to be sold?
This is where Utah-based Landvoice – Real Estate Seller Data aims to help. Landvoice, which was founded in 1991 in Salt Lake City, has built an exclusive nationwide database of properties that could become motivated candidates to soon go on the market.
“Landvoice is really in the business of helping the agent find new listing opportunities through data, and that’s where we got our start,” said President, Shaun Farr.
Landvoice has come a long way since the pre-Internet days when lead generation companies were compiling information from newspapers and faxing them to brokers.
Today Landvoice and affiliated companies have a longstanding relationship with ATTOM, which provides property and real estate data on its websites. Farr said ATTOM stood out among larger providers.
“The data is very much user-friendly, I also think it’s stronger,” Farr said. He noted that ATTOM blends data from various sources, enabling Landvoice to provide a deeper picture of each property. “Other databases have blind spots.”
Landvoice already provides detailed information on homes in pre-foreclosure, as well as expired listings where the properties went unsold for six months.
In May 2024, Farr said, the company will add another data set to their suite of real estate data: homes that are showing signs of distress but are not yet at the pre-foreclosure stage.
For example, if a property owner becomes distressed financially but has an abundance of equity in their home, Landvoice will help real estate agents identify these homes with a temperature gauge as you login to their platform. The tool will represent the home’s level of distress using an icon that will turn a darker shade of orange as the property approaches pre-foreclosure. This is a quick and easy way to find motivated sellers. Working with this data also puts the agent in the perfect position to list the home when the timing is right for the property owner.
The property data available on the Landvoice platform has many use cases. For example, brokers can find the essential details about the property, like the square footage and number of bedrooms, as well as the details about the mortgage. Farr said Landvoice can give brokers a picture of the home’s potential return. So that agents can go to a potential seller and talk confidently about how much money that homeowner can expect to net in equity after the sale.
Landvoice is also adding vacant homes to its database and properties with absentee homeowners. As with the distressed properties, all this information can give the broker an early lead on an otherwise hidden opportunity. At the very least, it provides a quick conversation starter with a potential seller.
“The Landvoice tool will allow us to help agents say, ‘Hey, maybe the homeowner is in between tenants,’” Farr said. “The next thing that owner is going to do is either put a new tenant in the property or sell it. We think that’s a good conversation starter and a perfect trigger to begin a conversation.”
Farr said that the launch of its distressed property database is perfectly timed. Although there still aren’t many properties in foreclosure by historic standards, Farr said he’s noticed that the numbers of distressed properties have been rising.
“There could be a little bit of a wave coming,” he said. “I’m blown away by some of the stress I’m seeing in the market right now.”
Farr said the launch of the distressed property datasets are on track for a May 30th launch date. All data will be sold on an exclusive basis by zip code during the initial launch.
“We’ve got the data all aligned,” Farr said. “There’s a couple of items on the back end that we’re still finalizing, but we’re testing this right now with teams in Florida, Tennessee, California and Washington. The tests performed in every state have been positive with many agents listing homes and requesting more data from our team.”
Landvoice is about to launch the most comprehensive database of hidden opportunities, and ATTOM’s data is supporting that. While the market is tough and the competition remains fierce, brokers can now easily search and target otherwise hidden properties that could become their next lucrative listing.
