Email deliverability for real estate teams
Where the addresses come from
- Open house sign-in sheets, transcribed by hand from handwriting, with a steady error rate.
- Portal inquiries from listing sites, which arrive machine-clean and sometimes masked behind a relay address.
- Past client records going back years, kept because a client who bought in 2018 may sell in 2026.
- Farming lists for a geographic area, bought or assembled, with the weakest consent story of the four.
A seven-year sales cycle
The average gap between property transactions is measured in years, so a real estate list is deliberately long-lived. A contact captured today may be worth nothing for five years and then be worth a commission.
That makes deleting an unengaged contact a genuinely expensive decision, in a way it is not for a retailer. The person is not a lapsed subscriber, they are a future transaction who currently has nothing to say.
It also means the data has years to decay quietly. An address captured at an open house in 2019 has had six years for the person to change employer, switch ISP or abandon a webmail account.
What the results tend to look like
Consumer-dominated, with heavy Gmail and a noticeable ISP share from people who have kept a broadband-provider address for years. Those ISP addresses die with the contract, which in a mobile population is a steady source of invisible decay.
What to do about it
Capture digitally at the open house
A tablet with a form removes the transcription step entirely, and an on-screen typo check catches the rest while the person is standing there.
Check the back catalog before a market-change campaign
The moment you most want to reach past clients is when rates move, and that is the least convenient time to find out how much of the list decayed.
Keep unengaged contacts and stop mailing them weekly
A quarterly touch to a long-horizon contact preserves the relationship without teaching mailbox providers that nobody opens your mail.
Treat portal relay addresses as temporary
Some listing sites mask the inquirer behind a relay that stops working. Ask for a direct address during the first real talk.
Questions people ask
Should old client records be deleted for being unengaged?
Rarely. The transaction cycle in property is measured in years, so an unengaged contact is often a future client rather than a lapsed one. Reduce frequency instead of removing them.
Why do handwritten sign-in sheets produce so many bad addresses?
Transcription. Somebody reads handwriting and types it, and a single wrong character produces an address that either bounces or belongs to a stranger.
How often should a property list be checked?
Annually, and before any campaign triggered by a market event. Those campaigns reach for the oldest records in the database.
Related sectors
See the breakdown on your own list
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled rather than guessed at, and we do not bill them.