Every list of wholesale lead sources I have read was written by someone selling one of them. I pull code enforcement data for seven Puget Sound markets every night, which is its own bias, so the claims below carry numbers where I have them.
Wholesale real estate leads are owners likely to sell below market quickly enough for a wholesaler to put the house under contract and assign that contract to a cash buyer for a fee. They come from two kinds of source: public records that describe a property's trouble, and channels where the owner comes to you. The records are crowded in proportion to how easy they are to download. The inbound channels are exclusive in proportion to what you spend.
The ranking is by signal strength per dollar, then by how few other people work the same file. It picks up where the distressed property playbook leaves off, and if you have not settled whether to buy leads or build them, motivated seller leads: buy or build comes first.
The ten sources at a glance
| Source | Cost | Time to first lead | Competition | Where it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Open code violations | Free from open-data cities, a records request elsewhere | Same day where a feed exists | Low | The biggest typed category, construction, is an owner spending money |
| 2. Vacant properties | Free (violation cases) or a HUD data request (USPS vacancy) | Days | Low to medium | No single vacant list exists; you build it |
| 3. Tax-delinquent rolls | Free or a small fee from the treasurer | Days to weeks | High | Arrives years into the story, and every course teaches it |
| 4. Pre-foreclosure filings | Free at the recorder, paid through aggregators | Days | Very high | The owner hears from every investor in town the week the notice records |
| 5. Probate | Free at the court clerk, slow to assemble | Weeks | Low | Low volume, and the heirs may be unreachable for months |
| 6. Absentee owners | Free from the assessor roll | Same day | High as a standalone list | Alone it is a landlord list; it only works stacked on a distress signal |
| 7. Fire, expired permits, 311 | Free where published | Days | Very low | Published in few cities; Seattle only in our data |
| 8. Driving for dollars | Your time and gas | Same day | Medium | No owner data in the car; each address needs a lookup afterward |
| 9. Expired listings and agent referrals | Free with MLS access or an agent partner | Weeks | Medium | The owner just proved they wanted retail |
| 10. Inbound: pay-per-lead, PPC, bandit signs | About $32 a click for the phrase "motivated seller leads" | Hours | High | Shared leads, self-reported motivation, and the meter never stops |
Source: FlaggedLeads data, 7 Puget Sound markets, September 2026, for the figures below. Click cost is the advertiser cost-per-click estimate for the phrase from keyword research data pulled September 2026.
1. Open code violations
An open code case is the city telling you, in writing and on a date, that an owner has stopped keeping up. Across our seven markets there are 19,145 open cases on 14,281 properties, and the type field is the whole game. Construction is the largest typed category at 4,507 open cases and the weakest wholesale signal in the file, because an owner cited mid-project is spending money on the house. Vacant building (460), the three emergency categories (553, 283, and 220), and land use (2,012) are the ones that mean trouble; which violation types signal a motivated seller has the split.
Repeats matter more than any single case. 2,826 of those properties carry two or more open cases, and where we know whether the owner lives there, the absentee share climbs from 53.9% at one case to 83.4% at five or more. Seattle publishes the feed as an open dataset; Tacoma's code enforcement program has its own map. Start with code violation leads.
2. Vacant properties
Nobody sells a vacant list because nobody keeps one. You assemble it from two records: the vacant-building case type in code enforcement, 2,170 cases across Seattle and Tacoma in our data (868 and 1,302; the other five markets do not publish the type), and the USPS vacancy data HUD publishes by census tract, which points you at the block and leaves the address to you.
A vacant house has no tenant to evict and an owner paying for nothing. The assembly is the only hard part, and vacant property list from public records is the instructions.
3. Tax-delinquent rolls
The county treasurer publishes who has stopped paying, and in Washington the clock is long: under RCW 84.64.050 the treasurer issues a certificate of delinquency after three years and forecloses from there. That timeline is the strength and the weakness. Three years of unpaid taxes is a serious signal, and by the time it is on the roll every wholesaler with a course certificate has mailed the address. The tax-delinquent property list walkthrough covers getting it and cutting it.
4. Pre-foreclosure filings
The notice of trustee's sale is public in Washington under RCW 61.24.040, and it is the lead source every wholesaler learns first. Which is the problem. An owner in default hears from a crowd of buyers the week the notice records, the auction clock is short, and the equity may already be gone. It stays on the list because the motivation is real. Pull it from the recorder yourself (how to find pre-foreclosures) instead of paying an aggregator for a file everyone else got the same morning.
5. Probate
When an owner dies holding property, the estate opens at the county superior court, and the heirs inherit a house they may live nowhere near and cannot agree about. The volume is small, the paperwork is slow, and the personal representative may take months to be appointed. Work it if you have patience and a good letter. The clerk is the source, and the Washington Courts site has the statewide case search. Divorce filings are the neighboring record.
6. Absentee and out-of-state owners
The assessor roll gives you every parcel whose tax bill goes somewhere other than the property, and that one field does more work than any other on this page. Of open-case properties where we know the posture, 57.6% are absentee, 6,652 of 11,556 including 825 PO Box owners, from 63.1% in Burien down to 45.5% in Mountlake Terrace.
On its own, though, an absentee list is a landlord list, and a landlord with a paying tenant has no reason to call you back. The field earns its keep stacked on a distress record, the argument in signal stacking. Pull the roll in bulk (bulk property owner data) and use it as a filter on sources 1 through 5.
7. Fire, expired permits, and 311 complaints
Three records almost nobody works, because no vendor packages them. In Seattle, where we ingest all three, properties with a fire incident carry a code violation 29.5% of the time against a 7.3% base rate (2,796 incidents); properties with an expired building permit, 12.9% against 7.2% (12,827 permits); and addresses with distress-adjacent 311 requests, 10.1% against 7.3% (241,279 requests on 56,889 addresses). Fire is the smallest set and the strongest lift. The pages: fire-damaged property leads, expired building permits, 311 complaints as leads. All Seattle only, because the other six markets do not publish these records.
8. Driving for dollars
Driving for dollars finds the houses the records have not caught up with: tarps, full gutters, a stack of phone books on the porch. The cost is your Saturday plus a lookup for every address, because the car gives you nothing else. It works best as a confirmation pass over a list you already built (code violations vs driving for dollars makes that case). As a primary source it is slow, and the tarp you can see from the street is the one three other drivers saw too.
9. Expired listings and agent referrals
An expired or withdrawn listing is an owner who wanted to sell and could not at retail. Agents see them first, and an agent who sends you the ones that fail is worth more than any list. The catch is that the owner just spent months anchored to a retail number, so the conversation opens at a price you cannot pay. Referrals cost nothing, take months to build, and do not scale on purpose.
A private listing is a separate category from an expired listing. Before chasing a pocket listing, ask who can access it and which marketing rules apply. Limited distribution by itself tells you nothing about the owner's financial position or willingness to discount.
10. Inbound: pay-per-lead vendors, PPC, and bandit signs
The owner comes to you. That is the entire appeal, and it is real when it happens. The cost is why it sits last: a click on "motivated seller leads" runs about $32, the vendors who buy those clicks resell each form fill to several investors, and a bandit sign is the analog version with a code enforcement fine attached where the city bans them. Before you dial any of it, read the TCPA and scrub against the Do Not Call registry. The vendor-by-vendor treatment is in motivated seller leads: buy or build.
What I would do with $300 and a Saturday
Pull the open code cases for my market, dedupe them to properties, keep the ones with two or more open cases, and match those to the assessor roll to flag absentee owners. In our seven markets that cut runs 14,281 open-case properties to 2,826 with two or more cases, 2,283 of them with a known posture, and 1,653 of those absentee (how to build a motivated seller list walks it step by step, including the construction drop). Skip trace the top 300 at roughly $0.10 a hit, which in our own tracing returned an owner 94.5% of the time across 691 lookups. Spend the rest on stamps.
Sources 3 through 7 get added one Saturday at a time; the free distressed property list post has the portal for each one. Source 10 waits until a deal pays for it.
If your market is one of ours, the free map has step one done.
Frequently asked questions
How do you get leads for wholesale real estate?
From public records first and inbound channels second. Open code violations, vacant-building cases, tax-delinquent rolls, pre-foreclosure notices, and probate filings are free or close to it at the city and county, and the assessor roll tells you which owners live elsewhere. Stack two on one parcel, skip trace the owner, and reach out by mail or phone. Pay-per-lead vendors and PPC are the paid version, at about $32 a click before margin.
What is the 70% rule in wholesaling?
A screening ceiling: 70% of the after repair value, minus the repair estimate and any assignment fee. BiggerPockets' explainer on the 70% rule covers the rule's assumptions. Follow the screen with an itemized project budget; financing, holding expenses, transaction expenses and the buyer's required margin determine what fits the actual deal.
Are wholesale leads free?
The records are. Code enforcement, tax, recorder, and court data are public, and Washington's Public Records Act covers what is not posted online. What costs money is the assembly and the trace: your hours matching addresses to parcels, then about $0.10 per skip-trace hit for the phone number.
What is the best free source of wholesale leads?
Open code violations, if your city publishes them. The signal is fresh, dated, typed by the city, and worked by few investors, and the type field lets you drop the construction cases that mean the opposite of distress. If your city does not publish, the tax-delinquent roll is the free fallback, with the tradeoff that everyone else has it too.
How much does a wholesale realtor make?
Wholesaling is not a realtor activity. A wholesaler holds a purchase contract and assigns it, and whether that needs a license depends on the state. The income is the assignment fee, the spread between the contract price and what the end buyer pays, and it varies by deal and by market. Anyone quoting a typical figure is selling a course.