There are two honest ways to source motivated seller leads in 2026. You can build the list yourself and run cold outreach, or you can pay per lead and have someone else hand you a pre-qualified conversation. PropContact has always been the first option. PropLeads, our sister product, is the second.
Both have a place. Neither is universally cheaper or universally better. The right answer depends on whether you have more time or more money, how much dispo bandwidth you can absorb, and how predictable you need your pipeline to be. This guide walks through both models honestly so you can pick the right one for where you are right now, or stack them together if you have the budget.
The Two Models in One Paragraph
PropContact is a build-your-own-list platform. You draw an area on a map, layer the filters that match your buy box, export a CSV of owner contact data, and run the outreach yourself. You pay a low per-row cost and absorb the cold-calling, texting, or mailing work. PropLeads is a pay-per-lead service. Their team runs outreach on your behalf, qualifies sellers against your criteria, and hands you the ones who actually want to talk. You pay a much higher per-lead price but skip the entire cold ops stack.
If you have time and want the lowest cost per row, PropContact wins. If you have money and want the lowest cost per conversation, PropLeads wins. Most established operators eventually use both.
PropContact Recap: The Build-It-Yourself Toolkit
PropContact is the toolkit a working investor uses to build lists they own forever.
- 150 million plus property records across all 50 states plus Washington D.C., refreshed regularly.
- 60 plus filter dimensions including high equity, absentee, corporate owners, trust owned, senior owner via date-of-birth data, MLS active, recently sold, expired listings, free and clear, property type chips, price range, beds, baths, sqft, year built, owner age, days on market, last sale price and date.
- Multi-area OR semantics: stack ZIPs, cities, and counties and the result is the union, not an impossible intersection.
- Per-user dedup at the property ID level, team-aware, so you never pay twice for the same parcel across builds. This is one of the single biggest cost savers most platforms ignore.
- Up to 6 phones per owner with carrier type, quality tier, match score, confidence, and matched name. Wireless phones get a Best Quality badge. DNC scrubbing on the primary phone.
- Up to 5 emails per owner.
- 150 free contacts at signup while the promo lasts.
- Free CSV export with 25 actionable columns by default, plus Full and custom layouts.
Pricing is built for people who run their own pipeline. Subscriptions start at $109 per month, and add-on credits drop to as low as half a cent per row on the Scale tier. One-time non-subscription credits run from 5 cents down to 1 cent on a volume curve. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on every monthly plan, and credits stay valid for 3 months on FIFO.
You walk away with a list of property owners, complete contact data, and the responsibility for what happens next.
PropLeads Explained: Buy Results, Not Raw Data
PropLeads inverts the workflow. Instead of selling you data, PropLeads sells you the outcome that data is supposed to produce: a real person who actually wants to sell.
Here is what that looks like in practice. You tell the PropLeads team what you buy. Single-family, three bedrooms or more, certain ZIP codes, equity range, target acquisition price. Their outreach operators run a phone and SMS campaign against properties that fit. They handle the dials, the dispositions, the rebuttals, the no-answer queue, the bad numbers, and the polite-but-firm "remove me from the list" calls. When a seller raises their hand, says they are open to an offer, and confirms the basic details of the property, PropLeads delivers that lead to you ready to call.
The pricing model is per qualified lead. You do not pay for dials, hours, or list size. You pay only when a real, interested seller is delivered. Based on industry-typical PPL pricing as of 2026, qualified motivated seller leads usually trade in a range that is one to two orders of magnitude higher than a raw skip-traced row from a data tool. The exact number depends on market, criteria strictness, and seller quality.
That gap looks brutal if you compare it to a cost-per-row line item. It looks reasonable when you remember the data row needs to be multiplied by the cost of every dial, every dialer minute, every no-answer, every voicemail, and every closer-hour to convert into the same thing PropLeads is shipping you.
Frame PropLeads as buying results, not data. That framing is the entire pitch.
Honest Comparison Table
| Dimension | PropContact | PropLeads |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per row (cents) | Per qualified lead (much higher) |
| Who runs outreach | You | PropLeads operators |
| Time to first conversation | Hours to days, depending on dialing speed | Days, but conversation is already qualified |
| Scalability | High, you control the list size | Moderate, gated by outreach capacity |
| Learning curve | Moderate, you need a workflow | Low, you just take the call |
| Control over criteria | Total, 60 plus filters at your hand | High, but defined upfront with their team |
| Best for | Operators who want lowest cost per row | Operators who want lowest cost per conversation |
Numbers in this guide are intentionally not stated as fixed dollar figures for PropLeads because qualified lead pricing varies by market and criteria. Treat industry-typical PPL pricing as of 2026 as a range, not a quote.
Use Cases: Which One You Should Pick
Solo wholesaler starting out. You are still learning to talk to sellers and you do not have $5,000 a month to spend on outsourced outreach. PropContact is the answer. Build a small list, dial it yourself, develop the muscle. Our wholesaling lead lists guide walks through how to scope a starter list without lighting cash on fire.
Agent running a one-person dispo desk. You can convert conversations but the calling itself is what is eating your week. Start on PropContact and run a tight system. When you have a closing month where you cannot afford to dial through 800 numbers personally, layer PropLeads on top to top up the pipeline.
Established team with budget and bandwidth. You already have a dispo team that knows how to close. Your bottleneck is not the conversations, it is finding them fast enough. PropLeads earns its price here because every qualified lead lands directly in the queue of someone whose calendar is already worth more than the lead cost.
Virtual dispo office. You run a small team that closes deals but does not want to manage a cold-call operation. PropLeads is the cleaner fit because there is no list-building, no skip-trace ops, and no dialer infrastructure to maintain.
Hybrid operator. Most experienced wholesalers and agents eventually end up here. They use PropContact for daily cold-call ops because nothing beats the per-row cost, and they call PropLeads when a closing date looms and the cold pipeline is not going to be enough.
Workflow Recipe: Using Both Together
Here is a clean way to stack the two products if you decide to run both.
- 1Use PropContact as your everyday list engine. Build lists weekly, dedup the parcels you have already worked, run your standard cold-call or SMS playbook against fresh rows. This is the cheapest cost per touch and you keep the data forever. Our how to use a real estate lead list playbook covers the operational side end to end.
- 2Track your cold pipeline output. Know your conversations-per-week, contracts-per-conversation, and closings-per-contract ratios. These numbers are how you know when to fire up PropLeads.
- 3When you have a closing date and a pipeline gap, fire up PropLeads. Tell their team your buy box and your timeline. The qualified leads coming back fill the gap your cold pipeline cannot close in time.
- 4Send PropLeads conversations through the same dispo process as your cold ones. Same contract template, same negotiation playbook, same closer. This keeps your data clean and lets you compare cost-per-deal honestly across sources.
- 5Review monthly. Look at cost per deal from PropContact and cost per deal from PropLeads. If your dispo bandwidth is the bottleneck, lean further into PropLeads. If your cash is the bottleneck, lean further into PropContact and tighten your cold ops.
Cold Outreach Quality Matters Either Way
If you go the PropContact route, the quality of your outreach is the entire game. A great list with bad outreach loses to an average list with disciplined outreach every time. If you have not pressure-tested your phone playbook lately, our 2026 cold-calling guide and the cold-calling scripts post are the two reads we point new operators at first.
If you go the PropLeads route, your part of the game becomes intake speed and disposition discipline. The leads are warmer than cold, but they cool fast. Calling a PropLeads lead within 5 minutes versus 50 minutes is the difference between a contract and a "we already went with someone else."
Closing Positioning
PropContact is the toolkit. It stays the cheapest per row in the market because we built it to give working investors complete control of their own pipeline. Same map, same filters, same dedup engine, every day, forever.
PropLeads is the scale option. When you would rather buy a conversation than build a list, PropLeads is the door. It costs more per lead by design, and it is worth it for operators whose closer time is already more expensive than the price of a delivered lead.
The honest test is this. If your bottleneck is money, PropContact wins. If your bottleneck is time, PropLeads wins. If your bottleneck is both, run them together and let the numbers tell you which mix is working.
Start free with 150 contacts on signup to try PropContact yourself.
Looking for leads delivered ready to call? Visit PropLeads to learn more about the pay-per-lead option.