NOD list calling has always been my best source but something shifted in Snohomish County around Q1 this year

Eleven contacts in week one means the list is definitely being resold, not just pulled by more investors independently.

What you are describing tracks exactly with what the strategy guide flags as the central execution headwind right now: more prospectors are hitting the same sellers, and the same county records that gave you an edge are now table stakes for a lot of operators.

A few things worth thinking through as you watch those March through May numbers.

The NOD (notice of default, the public filing that signals a homeowner has missed mortgage payments) is the most obvious motivated-seller signal in any county, which is precisely why it gets the most competition. The edge in any list comes from how many people are working it and how fast. Eleven contacts in a week means that list is saturated in Snohomish right now.

One thing worth looking into: pairing the NOD with a pre-NOD signal, something like tax delinquency, code violation, or probate filings, where the seller is under pressure but the public record is less obvious. Fewer callers tend to work those lists because they require more skip-tracing and the seller motivation is less guaranteed. The conversion rate may be lower per contact, but you may get there before the crowd does. I would not tell you that solves it because I do not know your market or your numbers, and this is a starting point for your own research.

The other thing I would confirm before cutting your caller's days is whether the problem is list saturation or follow-up timing. If eleven people call in week one, being caller twelve in week one probably does not help. Being caller two in week three might. A licensed real estate attorney or a compliance specialist familiar with your state's outreach rules would be worth a conversation before you change the sequence, since Washington has its own regulations around outbound contact.

What does your caller's contact-to-appointment rate look like compared to this time last year? That number would help me say something more specific.

The misconception worth correcting first: NOD lists are not proprietary to investors who pull county records directly, because several national data aggregators scrape and repackage those filings and sell them as subscription lists, which means the same homeowner can be on six different purchased lists the day the notice indexes. That is almost certainly what happened in Snohomish by late 2024. The compression you are seeing is not a signal problem, it is a supply problem on the buyer side of the lead, and the mail-then-call sequence does not help you there because the aggregator lists hit SMS before your mailer arrives. The piece worth testing is whether you can get to a different moment in the distress timeline, specifically pre-NOD, which means probate filings, tax delinquency rolls, and code enforcement liens, none of which are packaged and resold at the same volume yet. The cost-per-lead math on those sources looks worse upfront because the conversion timeline is longer, but you are talking to people before eleven other callers do, which is where 65 cents on the dollar actually becomes available again.

What is your current average days from NOD filing to your caller's first dial, and is there room to compress that, or is the ten-day window already tight?

What is the average days-to-trustee-sale in Snohomish right now, because that window determines whether pre-foreclosure contact still has room for negotiation at all?

The part about the list cost staying the same while conversion drops is the part people keep skipping over, and it is where the real damage is. If you are paying for the same data and the same caller hours but closing at half the rate, your effective cost per acquisition might have already crossed the threshold where the 65 cents on the dollar math stops working even on a clean deal. Have you actually run that number for Q1 specifically, not blended with last year?

What I would be doing is pairing the NOD list with something earlier in the chain, pre-NOD missed payment data if you can get it from a servicer-side source, or even a specific distress signal like code violations or tax delinquency in Snohomish before the notice files. The eleven contacts in week one are all starting from the same public filing date, so anyone who gets there before the recording has the field almost entirely to themselves. The list is not broken, the timing is.

The risk I do not see addressed yet is what happens to your caller's liability exposure when she reaches someone who is already in active loss mitigation. Washington's Consumer Protection Act, RCW 19.86, treats contact with a distressed homeowner who has already engaged a HUD-approved counselor or a loss mitigation servicer as a potential unfair practice if the caller's pitch creates confusion about the nature of the contact or implies foreclosure rescue services. Your caller is not offering those, but the line between "I want to buy your house" and "I can help you avoid foreclosure" blurs fast when a seller is panicked and eleven other people have already been working on them. One mischaracterized conversation, even an innocent one, is the kind of legal exposure that does not show up until a complaint is filed months later. Washington also has RCW 61.34 on foreclosure rescue, and while a straight acquisition call sits outside it, a caller who says anything about saving the home or stopping the sale steps inside it immediately. I would have her script reviewed by a Washington real estate attorney before you scale the sequence back up, not because she is doing anything wrong now, but because the crowded list environment means sellers are primed to misremember conversations.

On the list compression itself, the move that changes your position is timing, not pairing. If a service is reselling the NOD feed, every buyer on that feed is calling in the same seventy-two hour window after filing. The sellers who are genuinely motivated enough to transact at 65 cents are almost always the ones with a secondary pressure point, a job relocation, a health event, a co-owner dispute, none of which appear on the NOD. Your caller is currently asking price questions before she knows which of those secondary pressures exist, and that sequence puts her in a commodity conversation with the nine other cal

Automated same-day resale is almost certainly what happened. A service picks up the county filing, packages it, and sells it to twelve buyers before your caller even dials.

What is your mailer hitting on, price or process, because if it lands before the phone pile-on starts that piece might still be doing real work even if the call is losing its edge.

@op the Marysville seller with eleven contacts is not even the worst version of this. I had a caller working Cuyahoga pre-foreclosures last spring and we hit a pocket where a woman told us she had gotten texts before her NOD was even searchable on the county site, which made no sense until we figured out a title-adjacent service was scraping court filings same day and feeding them to aggregators. The gap between filing and public knowledge used to be two or three days of working room and now it can be zero. What I ended up doing was pairing the NOD list with probate leads in the same zip codes, because that pool moves slower and the competition is thinner even if the motivation profile is different. My caller's conversion on probate-adjacent distress is running maybe 40 percent better than straight NOD right now, though the volume is lower so it is not a clean swap. What zip codes in Snohomish are actually producing for you when she does get through?

Pre-NOD pulling works when NOD is saturated, but it front-loads your cost on a longer, colder timeline.

Snohomish specifically went from a sleeper county to a target county fast, and I think part of that is King spilling over. Investors who got priced out of acquisitions in King started working adjacent counties and they brought their dialers with them. The NOD list did not change, the competition density around it did. What I would look at before cutting her hours is whether you can front-load contact even earlier, like pre-NOD if you have a way to identify the distress signal, because right now everyone is racing to the same filing date. In central Ohio I have watched the same compression happen with eviction filings over the past eighteen months, different asset class but identical dynamic. What is your caller's average contact attempt number before she actually reaches someone, because if that number has gone up too the real cost bleed might be hiding there?

Same-day data resale is the most probable mechanism, but the part worth thinking about is what it does to your sequencing math even if you solve the source problem. Your caller reaching someone on day eight of a ten-day window who has already heard from eleven callers is a different conversation than reaching the same person on day two, so the question is whether compressing your follow-up to within 48 hours of filing changes the economics more than the list problem itself does. Take a simple model: if your current cost per contact is $40 and conversion was 1 in 12, a list that costs the same but gets you to the seller on day one or two rather than day eight might recover half that compression without changing the source at all. The pairing strategy worth testing is a pre-NOD indicator, specifically tax delinquency or code violation lists, where you are reaching the same distressed owner profile before the notice files and before the data is commercially available. That window is quieter because the resale infrastructure runs on recorded documents, not on assessor data that requires more processing to monetize. What does your caller's contact-to-conversation ratio look like compared to her conversation-to-offer ratio, because if conversations are holding up and only offers are dropping, that points to price compression from competing callers rather than a sourcing fix being the answer?

Snohomish County recorder data became available through a third-party aggregator that started same-day pushes to subscriber lists sometime in late 2024, and that single change collapsed the first-mover window from several days to a few hours for anyone willing to pay the subscription. Your mail-first sequence is now arriving as confirmation of a solicitation the seller already received by phone the same afternoon the notice filed, which means you are no longer introducing yourself, you are joining a crowd. The structure that wins in that environment is not faster contact but a different conversation, specifically one that happens before the NOD files, which means working pre-default lists: late property tax rolls, utility shutoff data where counties release it, and 30-to-60-day delinquency data that some servicers will surface through attorney networks. Those lists are smaller, less picked over, and the seller has not yet heard from eleven people because nothing public has filed yet. The tradeoff is that conversion to a motivated seller takes longer and your caller needs to carry the relationship across two or three contacts before the situation crystallizes.

What does your caller's current script do at the point where a seller says they are still weighing options, does she have a reason to call back in ten days or does the contact essentially end there?

The assumption doing the most work is that 65 cents still clears your margin once seller expectations reset to a higher floor after fielding ten other offers.

Pair it with the pre-NOD list, filing date minus the public notice, and you get the quiet window back.