Stop Buying Real Estate Leads: Where Title Companies Get Theirs, and How Agents Can Too

By the SBS team · October 12, 2026 · 8 min read

Title companies hand agents farm reports built from free county records. Here is what those records are, which leads they produce, and how a Tampa Bay agent can use them without paying per lead.

The leads you buy started as public records

When a title rep offers you a farm report, a property profile or a list of new owners, that data almost always traces back to a handful of public sources: the county property appraiser's roll, the clerk's official records, court dockets and legal notices. Tools like TitlePro247, ListSource, DataTree and PropertyRadar clean that data up and package it, but the raw material is public.

Lead portals work a little differently. They rank on search pages for home values, ZIP codes and listings, collect the inquiries, and sell them back to agents by ZIP code or as a referral fee at closing. Zillow's Flex program has charged referral fees reported in the 35 to 40 percent range.

What each public source tells you

None of this requires an MLS login. Expired and withdrawn listings are the exception: those come from the MLS and are licensed data.

• Property appraiser roll: owner name, mailing address, site address, homestead exemption, last sale date and price. Mailing address different from the property plus no homestead usually means an absentee owner or landlord.
• Clerk official records: deeds (new owners), mortgages and satisfactions (rough equity), and lis pendens (a foreclosure case has started).
• Court records and legal notices: probate notices to creditors, foreclosure notices of sale, tax deed applications.
• Tax collector: delinquent tax rolls, published each spring before the certificate sale.
• City code enforcement and permits: neglected properties, or owners who just renovated.

The lead types that convert, ranked by how safely you can work them

• Absentee owners and tired landlords: high volume, easy to mail.
• Long-time owners with likely equity: owned 15 years or more with no recent mortgage.
• New owners in your farm: tomorrow's sellers and today's referral sources.
• Pre-foreclosure: high value, but Florida's foreclosure-rescue law means you offer to list, never to save the home.
• Probate: real need, sensitive timing. Mail only, with a respectful delay.

The catch: how you contact them

Public records give you a name and an address, not permission to call or text. Federal and Florida telemarketing laws cover cold calls and texts to homeowners, including pitches to list. Direct mail and door knocking do not carry those restrictions, which is why the strongest public-records programs are built on mail, with a way for the owner to raise their hand.

That raised hand is the key. A mailer with a QR code to a "what is my home worth" page turns a cold record into an owner who asked to hear from you, with their phone number and their consent.

How SBS does this for Tampa Bay agents

SBS for Real Estate pulls the county tax roll files for all 67 Florida counties, finds the owners in the ZIP codes you farm, and gives you a fresh list every week: absentee owners, long-time owners, new owners, LLC-owned homes, and in Hillsborough, new foreclosure filings. Each lead comes with a mail-ready letter carrying your brokerage name and a QR code to your own home value page.

When an owner scans and asks for a value, they land in your SBS contacts with their consent recorded, and your follow-up runs from there. No per-lead fees and no referral fee at closing. SBS for Real Estate is $149 a month for a solo agent, or $399 a month for a whole team with unlimited agents.