My follow-up sequence has been running eight months and I still don't know if a lead is dead or just slow

Pinal county absentee lists are brutal for exactly this reason, a lot of those owners are phoenix metro people who bought land or a second property out there and have no urgency whatsoever, so twelve weeks is genuinely nothing to them.

What I've seen work is a third bucket, not active, not dead, just "ambient", drops them into a once-a-quarter single touch, no sequence logic, no scoring pressure, just stays warm. The rule I've heard people use is: if they opened anything at all, even once, they go ambient instead of dead, because an open is a signal even without a reply.

Two years is actually a realistic timeline for that market and that seller type, so killing the record after seven touches in three months is probably costing you the slow movers.

Seven touches in twelve weeks is fairly compressed, and a sequence on a 300-name rural list can run 18 months before a touch 11 callback closes.

The dead or alive binary is the real problem here, more so than the length of the sequence. A workable alternative is a slow-drip bucket for stale contacts: one postcard or one email every 90 days, no sequence numbering, just a calendar trigger, tagged as dormant with a revisit quarter so the crm stops counting them as active pipeline without pretending they are gone. Two years is realistic on absentee owners. Take an owner in maricopa county who runs 26 months from first contact to signed psa and never responds to anything until month 22, when a property tax situation changes and he calls out of nowhere. There is no signal ahead of that, which is exactly why a touch count cannot tell you. The 90-day touch costs almost nothing and keeps a number from going cold in the inbox.