How to use this playbook

ProbateData · 144+ counties · serving real estate professionals since 2009 · probatedata.com
This is the written companion to the 20-minute walkthrough. Watch the video, keep this open beside it, and do the steps as they come up. Each section below covers one section of the video and is timestamped so you can jump straight to it.

What you will be able to do by the end

•          Open a batch of probate filings and separate the properties that are actually available from the noise, in under ten minutes.
•          Stack filters in the right order so your download allowance goes to cases that match your price range and your county.
•          Run the one search experienced members run every week — the out-of-state petitioner search.
•          Explain in one sentence why this list converts better than the leads you are buying now.

The one idea

Filing for probate is the motivation signal. Nobody files for fun. They file because an estate has to settle — debts, bills, heirs, the personal representative, the attorney — and for most estates the largest asset is the house. Whatever outreach already works for you in the regular market works better here, for the simple reason that the person on the other end has to move forward.

Who this is for

If you have never worked probate. Read straight through once without touching a keyboard. You will finish knowing the vocabulary, the workflow, and whether this fits how you already prospect. Nothing here requires a coach or a course.
If you are on a trial or plan right now. Work the checklists as you go. By the last section you will have a working list, two saved searches, and a first week of outreach mapped out.

The ten sections

Follow along with your own county. The trial is $1 for 7 days and includes every probate case filed in your county while it runs, plus 50 downloads for your own searches. Cancelable in two clicks, no contract.
Start the $1 trial →

1. The two ways your probate leads arrive

Video: 00:00–02:30
Leads reach you two ways. Most new members only use one of them for the first month and leave the better half of the value sitting there.

Door one — the county drop, delivered

You pick a county when you sign up. From that moment, every probate case filed in that county comes to you by email, with no cap on how many. The batch might be 35 cases, it might be 105. Whatever the court produced, you get.
The email is titled “Your ProbateData leads are here — [County]” and carries two links: CSV and PDF. Click either and it downloads straight to your desktop. Most people take the CSV, because it goes into a dialer or a CRM without any conversion step.

Door two — the platform, searched

Separately, you log in and run your own searches across the counties and date ranges you choose, then download from the results. That allowance is a monthly number — 50 on the trial, higher on the paid plans. Section 5 settles exactly how the two doors relate.

What “enriched” means before it reaches you

Every case in the batch has already been through this. You are not receiving a court scrape.

Do this now

•          ☐ Confirm which county your account is set to. Everything downstream depends on it.
•          ☐ Find the most recent “Your ProbateData leads are here” email — search your inbox for probate data leads.
•          ☐ Click the CSV link and open the file. Do not sort or edit anything yet.
•          ☐ Write down the row count. That is your starting pool.
Start the $1 trial →

2. What every column in the file means

Video: 02:30–05:00
The header row is the whole product. Spend three minutes here and the rest of the file stops looking like a wall of text.

Why the petitioner column is the one to internalize

The decedent’s name gets your attention, but the petitioner is the human being who has to make a decision. Their relationship to the decedent tells you the emotional register of the call. Their city and state tell you how hard the property is for them to deal with — which is the entire subject of section 4.

Do this now

•          ☐ Pick one row. Read it left to right, every column.
•          ☐ Say out loud who you would contact, where they live, and what the property is worth.
•          ☐ Draft one opening sentence for that specific person. Not a script — one sentence.
•          ☐ Check the DNC column for that row and decide which channel you would actually use.
Start the $1 trial →

3. Market status, and your A-leads

Video: 05:00–07:30
One column decides which rows deserve your afternoon. This is the highest-leverage thirty seconds in the file.

The sort, in the spreadsheet

1.        Select the full data range, header row included.
2.        Data → Sort range, confirm your data has a header row, and sort by Market Status.
3.        Copy the Available block to a fresh tab. That tab is your call list for the week.

The shortcut, if spreadsheets are not your thing

Upload the CSV to whichever assistant you already use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — and ask for the sheet you actually want back. Skip the spreadsheet skills entirely.
Here is a CSV of probate filings. Return a new sheet with only the rows where
Market Status is "Available" and there is at least one phone number. Sort by AVM
value, highest first, keep every original column, and add a column flagging whether
the petitioner's state differs from the property's state.

Do this now

•          ☐ Sort by Market Status, count your Available rows, and write the number down.
•          ☐ Copy them to a new tab named for the week. Delete nothing — Unknown rows are worth revisiting.

Follow along with your own county. The trial is $1 for 7 days and includes every probate case filed in your county while it runs, plus 50 downloads for your own searches. Cancelable in two clicks, no contract.
Start the $1 trial →

4. The out-of-state signal

Video: 07:30–08:30
Sort one more column and your list splits into two piles that need two different messages.
The petitioner is the person handling the estate. When their state does not match the property’s state, the situation changes in a way you can hear on the phone.

Why distance raises motivation

•          They cannot swing by. Every trash-out, every lock change, every contractor bid needs someone local or a flight.
•          The property is generating cost while they sit on it — taxes, insurance, utilities, sometimes a mortgage.
•          They already have a full life somewhere else. The estate is an interruption, and closing it is the goal.
•          They are far less likely to have a local agent already in the picture.

What changes about the outreach

In-state petitioner. They can see the house. Lead with market specifics: what comparable estate sales in that pocket closed at, what the timeline looks like, what the court will want to see.
Out-of-state petitioner. Lead with the distance problem, not the price. You are offering to be the person who handles the thing they cannot handle from six states away. Price comes second.

Two openers, same list

In-state: “I work estate sales in [area] and saw the case was opened on the [street] property. Two comparable estate sales closed nearby this quarter. If it helps, I can put together what the court would want to see on value before you decide anything.”
Out-of-state: “I handle estate properties in [county] and noticed you are administering the [street] property from [their state]. Handling that at a distance is the hard part. Happy to walk it, photograph it, and tell you honestly what it needs — no obligation either way.”

Do this now

•          ☐ Sort by Petitioner State. Count how many petitioners are outside the property’s state.
•          ☐ Move those rows into a tab called “Out of state.”
•          ☐ Write two opening messages — one for each pile. Two or three sentences each is enough.
Start the $1 trial →

5. Email delivery versus platform downloads

Video: 08:30–10:30
This is the most common support question, so here it is settled once.
The question: “I just got an email with 55 leads for LA County. Does that mean I maxed out my downloads on the platform?”
No. They are two separate taps and they do not draw from the same tank.

Why the distinction matters strategically

Email covers you forward. Downloads cover you backward and sideways. If you only read the emails, you are working the last few weeks of your county and ignoring every case filed in the months before you signed up — a larger pool, and one that almost nobody is calling, because the agents who bought data before you already moved on.
That is what section 6 is for.

One more thing the platform tracks

Every case shows a lead status. A marker tells you it was already sent to you by email; a download arrow tells you that you pulled it inside the app. Nothing is hidden and nothing is lost — if you need a case again, re-download it. It does not cost you twice.

Do this now

•          ☐ Log in and find your download counter. Note how many you have this month.
•          ☐ Open your most recent email batch and note the oldest date filed in it. You need that date in the next section.
Start the $1 trial →

6. The backfill: cases filed before you signed up

Video: 10:30–12:30
The cases filed before you showed up are still sitting there. This is how you claim them.
In the video, the oldest case in the emailed batch was filed May 20. So the obvious move is to search for everything filed before May 20 — cases that exist, are in coverage, and have never landed in that inbox.

The steps

1.        Click New Search.
2.        Pick your state. Green states are the ones with cases in select counties — 130+ counties nationwide.
3.        Select your county. You can select more than one if your plan covers it.
4.        Set the date range to end one day before the oldest date filed you found in section 5.
5.        Search, and read the count.

What that returned in the video: May 1 to May 19, Los Angeles County — 197 cases. Every one of them filed before his email history began. That is the pool the next section cuts down.

Why these are not picked-over leads

Two reasons. First, the platform tracks the MLS continuously, so anything listed or sold since filing gets flagged — you filter those out instead of guessing. Second, a filing from two months ago is not a cold lead: probate does not resolve in two months. The estate is still open, the property is still there, and most people who bought a list in May stopped following up weeks ago.

Set the range with intent

Do this now

•          ☐ Run a new search for the 30 days before your oldest emailed case.
•          ☐ Write down the raw count before you filter anything.
•          ☐ Do not download yet. The next section is about not wasting the allowance.
Start the $1 trial →

7. The filter stack: 197 cases down to 42

Video: 12:30–15:00
Clean the data before you download it, not after. Every filter you apply is a download credit you do not burn on a row you were never going to call.
The download limit is not the constraint people think it is. With 197 results and 50 downloads, the answer is not “download the first 50.” It is to remove everything you would not have called anyway, then download what is left.

The order matters

1.        Status first. Largest cut for the least judgment. Nothing else is worth filtering until the unavailable rows are gone.
2.        Contactability. Phone yes, email yes. A perfect lead you cannot reach is not a lead.
3.        Your price band. Set the AVM range you actually transact in — in the video, $500k to $2M.
4.        Dates last. The cheapest cut in quality terms, because the cases you drop are still there next week. Use it to land on your number.

Then take them all

Check the select box and it will tell you all 10 records on the page are selected, then offer Select all 42 records. Take the second option, or you will download one page and think that was the batch.

Do this now — write your own numbers

•          ☐ Raw: ______ → Available: ______ → phone and email required: ______
•          ☐ AVM band ( ______ to ______ ): ______ → narrowed dates: ______
•          ☐ Select all records, not just the page, and download.
Start the $1 trial →

8. The motivated-seller search: 99 down to 10

Video: 15:00–17:30
This is the search long-time members rerun every week, and the reason is in section 4.

Build it in this order

1.        State, then county, then date range. Always start with the basic search and let the count settle before you filter.
2.        Market status: Available. 99 results on the screen at this point.
3.        Petitioner has a phone number: Yes.
4.        Petitioner has an email address: Yes.
5.        Petitioner state → exclude your own state. Searching California, exclude California. What is left is every case being handled from somewhere else.

The result: 10 cases. Cream of the crop. In the video: one petitioner in Missoula, Montana. One in Denver. A high-value property in Orange County being administered from a different time zone, with a phone number and an email address attached.

Why ten beats ninety-nine

Ten cases where the decision-maker is out of state, reachable, and holding an available property is a week of real conversations. Ninety-nine unsorted rows is a week of dialing. The filters are not there to shrink your list for its own sake — they are there to concentrate it into the calls that go somewhere.

Make it repeatable

Run this same stack every week, moving the date range forward as new filings arrive. It becomes a standing appointment with the ten most motivated people in your county rather than a research project you rebuild from scratch each time. See Three filter recipes for the version to save.

Follow along with your own county. The trial is $1 for 7 days and includes every probate case filed in your county while it runs, plus 50 downloads for your own searches. Cancelable in two clicks, no contract.
Start the $1 trial →

9. Date of passing versus date filed

Video: 17:30–19:00
Both of these cause new members to throw away good leads in their first month.

One — the date of passing does not matter. The filing date does.

You will open cases where the person passed years ago and the probate was filed last month. Do not discount those. If anything, read them as a decision that has just been made.
The pattern, from the video: Someone passes in 2016. There is no urgency — the estate has cash, the family agrees, and a relative moves into the house. Ten years go by. Then they realize they are sitting on roughly $775,000 in equity and decide to sell. They cannot: the property is still in grandpa’s name. So a son gets appointed as petitioner and files. That case appears in your batch this week.
What you have there is a family that has already decided to sell, a property with ten years of deferred maintenance, and a title problem that has to clear before anyone can transact. The old date of passing is not staleness. It is the setup.

Two — old filings are not picked over, because the MLS is tracked continuously

The reason you can prospect back through older filings with confidence is that the status column keeps up. Once a property has been listed or sold, it flips to Listed or Sold and drops out of your Available pool automatically. You are never guessing whether someone beat you to it.
Flip that filter around deliberately and it becomes market intelligence: search Listed and Sold in an older range and you can see how long properties in your price band actually take to move after filing. In the video, the higher-value properties were the ones still sitting — bigger properties take more time, and knowing that shapes how patient your follow-up should be.

Do this now

•          ☐ Find one case in your file where the passing was more than three years before the filing. Read it as a fresh decision, not an old death.
•          ☐ Run one search filtered to Listed and Sold in a range 60 to 90 days back. Note how many, and at what values.
•          ☐ Adjust your follow-up cadence to what you just learned about timing in your price band.
Start the $1 trial →

10. Why probate outperforms your other lead sources

Video: 19:00–20:00
The closing argument, and it is arithmetic rather than enthusiasm.
The principle: All things being equal, whatever is already working for you in your regular market works better in probate. Not because the tactic changes — because the motivation is already established. They filed. Filing means motivation.
Phone calls, postcards, door knocking, signs, texting, hand-written notes — whatever channel you are good at, bring that one. There is no probate-specific tactic you need to learn first. The list is what changes, not your craft.

Why the motivation is structural, not hopeful

To close an estate they have to settle the debts, pay the bills, pay the attorney, pay the personal representative, and distribute to the heirs. For the majority of estates the largest asset by a wide margin is the real estate. The house is what funds the settlement. That is not a pressure tactic; it is how the process works.
Do not do this. Call them as though you know something they do not. Any version of “you have no choice but to sell” reads as arrogance about a death in their family, and it ends the conversation before it starts.
Do this instead. Start a relationship, and be slightly unusual. Some investors and agents drive by, photograph the property, and text the photo: “Noticed the property has been sitting a while, and you are out in Kansas. Would you like help taking care of this?” Useful, specific, low pressure.

The math

Your first seven days

Sized deliberately to a trial week. Roughly 45 minutes a day, and by day seven you are deciding from data instead of impressions.
Day 1 — Open the batch. Download the CSV from your county email. Sort by market status. Count your Available rows and copy them to a working tab. Do nothing else — read the file until the columns feel familiar.
Day 2 — Split the list. Sort by petitioner state and pull the out-of-state rows into their own tab. Write two opening messages: one for in-state, one for out-of-state. Three sentences each, in your own voice.
Day 3 — First 20 touches. Whatever channel already works for you — calls, texts, postcards, door knocks. Check the DNC column before you dial. Log every response, including the silence.
Day 4 — Backfill. Find your oldest emailed filing date, search the 30 days before it, then run the filter stack until the count fits your download allowance. Download all records, not just the first page.
Day 5 — Build the motivated-seller search. Available, phone yes, email yes, exclude your own state. Save it. This becomes your standing weekly search.
Day 6 — Work the attorney column. Send five short emails to the probate attorneys named in your file. Introduce yourself as the agent in that county who handles estate sales and can prep a property for court. One relationship here outlasts any single lead.
Day 7 — Count. Contacts attempted, conversations had, appointments set, listings or contracts in motion. Compare it to your current lead source on cost per conversation. Decide from the numbers.
What a realistic week looks like. You will not list four houses in seven days, and anyone promising that is selling something else. What you should expect from one county worked properly: a clean list of available properties with reachable decision-makers, several real conversations, at least one attorney who now knows your name, and a repeatable weekly search that keeps producing after the trial ends.

Follow along with your own county. The trial is $1 for 7 days and includes every probate case filed in your county while it runs, plus 50 downloads for your own searches. Cancelable in two clicks, no contract.
Start the $1 trial →

Three filter recipes to save

Build these once. Rerun them by moving the date range forward.

Recipe A — This week’s A-leads

Run it every Monday. Purpose: the cleanest available properties in your county right now.
•          State and county: yours
•          Date filed: the last 7 to 14 days
•          Market status: Available
•          Petitioner phone: Yes
•          AVM: your transacting range

Recipe B — Out-of-state motivated

Run it every week, same day. Purpose: the highest-motivation slice, and the one worth calling first.
•          State and county: yours
•          Date filed: the last 30 to 60 days
•          Market status: Available
•          Petitioner phone: Yes · Petitioner email: Yes
•          Petitioner state: exclude your own state

Recipe C — The backfill sweep

Run it once a month, stepping further back each time. Purpose: the untouched pool nobody is still following up on.
•          State and county: yours
•          Date filed: a 30-day window, starting one day before your oldest worked case
•          Market status: Available (this is what removes anything already listed or sold)
•          Petitioner phone: Yes · Petitioner email: Yes
•          AVM: your transacting range, then tighten the dates until the count fits your allowance
The rule behind all three. Status first, contactability second, price band third, dates last. Filter before you download, and your allowance goes entirely into rows you were always going to call.
Start the $1 trial →

Probate glossary for real estate agents

Every term used in the walkthrough, defined the way an agent would explain it to another agent.
Probate — The court process that settles an estate after someone dies without a living trust in place. Debts get paid, assets get distributed, and property usually has to be sold to make that arithmetic work.
Decedent — The person who passed away. Their name is on the case and often still on title. Never the person you contact.
Petitioner / personal representative (PR) — The person who filed to administer the estate, often a son, daughter, or sibling. Your decision-maker.
Date filed — When the probate case was opened with the court. The only date that indicates timing on your side.
Date of passing — When the decedent died. Can be years before the filing and does not weaken the lead.
A-lead — Shorthand for a case whose market status reads Available: title matches and nothing has been listed or sold since filing.
Market status — The triage column. Available, Unknown, NA, Listed, or Sold.
AVM — Automated valuation model: the estimated property value, drawn from the same enterprise data lenders and escrow companies use. It is where the number on your BPO originates.
BPO — Broker price opinion. The valuation you produce for a lender or an estate.
DNC — Do Not Call registry. A “yes” in that column means do not dial that number; use mail, door, or email instead.
Skip tracing — Finding current phone numbers and email addresses for a person from public and licensed data. Included, not an add-on.
Out-of-state petitioner — The petitioner’s state differs from the property’s state. The strongest single motivation signal in the file.
Full Estate View — The complete property picture attached to a case: characteristics, tax assessment, ownership history, comparable sales.
Backfill — Searching filings from before you signed up. Cases that exist, are still open, and are no longer being followed up by anyone.
One sentence to remember. Sort by market status, call the out-of-state petitioners first, and judge recency by the filing date rather than the date of passing.
Start the $1 trial →

The next step

Everything in this playbook runs on one input: a current, verified list of the probate filings in your county. That is the part you cannot build yourself, and it is the part the trial hands you in the next few minutes.
•          Every case filed in your county during the trial, delivered to your inbox — no cap on how many
•          50 downloads to run your own searches, including the backfill and the out-of-state search
•          Skip tracing and DNC scrubbing on every record
•          Property data and valuations from the source that lenders and title companies underwrite from
•          CSV exports that drop into the CRM you already use
•          $1 for 7 days, cancelable in two clicks, no contract
Start the $1 trial → specials.probatedata.com
Questions on any step in this playbook: support@probatedata.com
ProbateData · 3950 Paramount Blvd, Lakewood, CA 90712

Updated on: 03/08/2026