Every lead tool sells freshness. New records, updated daily, hot off the county feed. The pitch trains you to think a lead has a shelf life, like milk, and that an old one has already gone bad.
For distress signals, that instinct is mostly wrong, and it costs people good deals.
How old is too old? For a distress signal like a code violation, an open case rarely gets too old to matter. A fresh notice earns a small edge because the situation is clearly active, but an old case that's still open is usually the stronger lead, because the owner has had years to fix it and hasn't. What actually goes stale is the owner's contact info and the cases that already closed. The distress itself doesn't. That's the decay logic underneath every property distress signal, and it's why I don't throw out an old case.
The data backs it up. Across the seven Puget Sound markets I track, nearly four in five open code violations were filed more than a year ago, and two-thirds are more than two years old. If old meant dead, most of the signal on the map would be worthless. It isn't. The age is the tell.
What actually decays, and what doesn't
Two different things get called "old," and mixing them up is where the mistake happens.
The distress itself doesn't decay. A code violation is a public record of an unresolved problem. As long as the case is open, the problem is still there and the pressure is still on. A two-year-old open vacant-building case isn't a cold lead. It's an owner who has ignored the city for two years running.
What does decay is everything around the signal:
- Contact data. Phone numbers and mailing addresses go stale fast. Skip-trace results from six months ago miss the owner who moved. That's the part worth refreshing before you reach out.
- Closed cases. A violation that got resolved and closed is genuinely old news. The owner fixed it, the pressure lifted. Filter those out, and most of what looks like "old data" goes with them.
- The window on a hot case. A brand-new emergency or vacant filing has a first-mover advantage. Get there before the mailers pile up. That's a race against other investors, and it has nothing to do with the signal going bad.
So the honest answer to "is this lead too old" is a different question: is the case still open, and is my contact info current? Get those two right and the file date barely matters.
Why our score rewards recency but never punishes age
This is baked into how the distress score works, and it's a deliberate choice.
A violation with recent activity gets a small freshness bonus, because a case that moved in the last six months is clearly live. But there is no age penalty. An old open case is never docked points for being old. If anything, the volume and duration of unresolved cases push the score up, because a property that's been accumulating violations for years is the definition of chronic distress.
Most tools do the opposite. They decay a lead's value on a clock, so a two-year-old record scores lower automatically. Run that logic on the distribution above and you'd suppress two-thirds of the strongest signals on the map. The owner who has stonewalled the city the longest would rank the lowest. That's backwards.
There's a mechanical reason too: the score only ever tracks upward. A property's score updates when new distress lands. The calendar rolling forward does nothing to it, so nothing rots in the list just because time passed.
Signals don't all age the same way
"Recency" isn't one setting, because different distress signals mean different things over time.
- Code violations hold up longest. An open case is an open case whether it's six months or six years old. Age here mostly adds weight.
- Fire incidents are a moment in time. A fire two years ago that got repaired is history. A fire two years ago on a property that's still sitting vacant is a very different story, which is why a fire only means something stacked with a current signal.
- Expired permits age into distress. A permit that lapsed last month might just be paperwork. One that's been dead for three years is a stalled project the owner walked away from. Older is often stronger.
- 311 complaints are the noisiest and the most perishable. A single old complaint means little on its own.
The point is that you don't apply one freshness rule across the board. You read each signal for what its age is telling you, then let the stack settle it. This is a different problem from buying a stale purchased list, where the whole file is old and untargeted. Here the file date is information, and the age is part of the read.
How to actually use age when you work a list
Age is a tiebreaker, not a filter. Here's the order I'd put it in.
- Confirm the case is open. This is the only hard cut. Closed means resolved means skip. Everything below assumes an open case.
- Refresh the contact data before you use the lead. Before you mail or call, re-verify the owner and mailing address. That's the piece that actually went stale. The filtering workflow covers where this fits.
- Use recency to break ties. Between two similar open cases, the one with recent activity is the safer first call. But don't drop the old one. Old and open is often the more motivated owner.
- Move fast only on the genuinely hot ones. A brand-new vacant or emergency case is where speed pays, because you're racing other investors. For everything else, the deal isn't going anywhere.
An old case that's still open isn't a lead that got away. It's a lead nobody else bothered to chase, which is the whole reason it's still there.
Frequently asked questions
How old is too old for a real estate lead?
For a distress signal like a code violation, an open case rarely gets too old to be worth pursuing. The property's problem is unresolved as long as the case is open, so the owner is still under pressure regardless of the file date. What does go stale is the owner's contact information, which should be re-verified before you reach out, and cases that have already been closed, which are no longer live signals.
Are old code violations worth calling on?
Often more than fresh ones. A violation that has stayed open for a year or two signals an owner who has had every chance to resolve it and hasn't, which is a stronger sign of distress than a case filed last week. Across the markets I track, two-thirds of open violations are more than two years old, and those chronic cases are some of the best leads on the map.
Should I ignore leads older than a certain date?
Not for distress signals. A date cutoff makes sense for time-sensitive events, but a code violation is a standing condition rather than a one-time event. Filtering by open-versus-closed status is far more useful than filtering by age. Drop the closed cases and keep the open ones, old or new.
Do distress signals lose value over time?
Some do, some gain. A fire incident fades once the property is repaired. An expired permit often gets stronger with age, because a long-dead permit means a stalled project. An open code violation holds its value as long as it stays open. That's why you read each signal for what its age means rather than applying one decay rule to all of them.
What actually goes stale in a lead list?
The contact data and the closed cases. Phone numbers and mailing addresses drift as people move, so skip-trace results need refreshing. And any case that has been resolved and closed is genuinely old news. The underlying distress signal, an open unresolved violation, is not what expires. You can see current open cases on the free map for the markets I cover.