The Question Every New Investor Asks
You buy 100 fresh probate leads. You write the letters, you mail them, you wait for the phone to ring. How many calls should you actually expect? How many of those calls turn into deals?
Most lead vendors will not give you a straight answer. The honest answer is that it depends on your market, your outreach quality, and a fair amount of variance. But there is a realistic range, and knowing it is the difference between treating your first 100 leads as a fair test and abandoning the channel after one disappointing batch.
This post walks the funnel from raw leads to closed deals using numbers that match what experienced Ohio probate investors report. Use it to set expectations, plan your capital, and decide whether your results are tracking or whether something in your process needs adjustment.
The Funnel at a Glance
Here is the full funnel, end to end, for a typical batch of 100 fresh probate leads in Southwest Ohio:
The wide range at the bottom is real. A new investor running their first 100 leads should plan for 0 to 2 deals, not 5. Two deals on your first batch is excellent. One is normal. Zero is recoverable if your process is sound.
Stage 1: How Many of 100 Are Actually Workable
This is the stage most new investors underestimate. Not every probate filing has real estate behind it. In Ohio, a meaningful share of cases are filed for unclaimed funds, small estates with no property, or estates where the only asset is a vehicle or bank account.
Beyond the no-real-estate cases, several other patterns reduce workability:
In Southwest Ohio, expect 25 to 45 percent of raw filings to fall into one of these categories. A vendor that pre-filters these (or at least flags them) saves you the expense of mailing letters that will never produce a deal.
For more on this filter, see Why Many Ohio Probate Cases Have No Real Estate. For the inverse signal of which cases are most likely to sell, Out-of-State Heirs and Probate Sale Probability explains the heir-geography pattern. For the full structured framework on every common disqualification pattern, see When to Pass on an Ohio Probate Lead.
Stage 2: How Many Mailers Reach a Real Person
You sent 60 well-targeted mailers. How many actually arrive at the executor's mailbox?
Probate executors are often out-of-state heirs managing the estate from a distance. Address quality varies. Expect 8 to 15 percent return-of-mail on the first send, even with court-listed addresses. Reasons:
Of the mailers that arrive, not every recipient opens or reads them. Some go straight to the trash, especially if the envelope looks like marketing. A respectful, hand-addressed letter on plain paper with a personal-tone message gets opened more often than a glossy postcard.
Plan on 40 to 55 of your original 100 mailers actually being read by a person who can act on them.
Stage 3: How Many Conversations Are You Having
This is the response-rate stage. Industry norms for probate mail in Ohio:
So 40 to 55 read mailers, multiplied by a 5 to 12 percent response rate over your first follow-up cycle, produces 2 to 6 conversations from your first 100 leads.
Not every conversation is a deal lead. Some calls are angry ("how did you get my number"), some are polite no-thank-yous, some are heirs who are in the discovery phase and not ready to decide. A meaningful share of first calls are people who want to understand what you do before they consider selling. Those calls are not wasted; they often convert on a follow-up call 60 to 120 days later.
For more on conversation tone and timing, Best Practices for Contacting Probate Executors covers the script and follow-up cadence. For the specific phrasing of the first letter or call (the five openers that get you ignored and the four that build trust), see How to First-Contact a Probate Heir or Executor Without Offending Them. For the timing window when these conversations are most productive (and why outreach in the first ninety days tends to produce only exploratory replies), How Long Does Ohio Probate Take? A Realistic Timeline for Investors covers the four-to-eight-month buy window.
Stage 4: How Many Conversations Convert to a Deal
Of the 2 to 6 conversations from your first 100 leads:
Run the math: 2 to 6 conversations, half decision-stage (1 to 3), of which 30 to 50 percent convert (0 to 2 deals).
That is the realistic answer. Your first 100 leads should produce 0 to 2 deals within 90 days, with 1 being the expected median for a new investor running a competent process in Southwest Ohio.
Why the Variance Is Real
The range is wide because probate investing is a small-numbers game. With only 2 to 6 conversations from your first batch, a single conversation that goes well or badly meaningfully changes your outcome. Some patterns to expect:
The investors who succeed in probate are the ones who see the first 100 leads as a calibration batch, not a verdict. Run the second batch, the third, the sixth. The math gets clearer with volume.
What to Do If Your First 100 Doesn't Convert
If you ran 100 leads competently and closed zero deals in the first 90 days, before you abandon the channel, audit four things:
If all four are sound and the math still does not work after 200 to 300 leads, probate may not be the right fit for your specific market or capital position. But a single underperforming batch is not enough information.
Where Structured Data Reduces the Noise
Most of the variance at Stage 1 (workability) is data quality. The same 100 raw filings, filtered by an investor manually checking each docket, may yield only 50 actually-workable cases. Filtered by a structured pipeline that reads Form 4.0 inventories, cross-checks county auditor records, and flags TOD and trust patterns, the same list may yield 70.
Ohio Probate Data delivers weekly files for the seven Southwest Ohio counties (Montgomery, Hamilton, Greene, Warren, Butler, Clark, Miami) with the workability filters already applied. The Sample Leads page shows the format. The Free Sample page lets you test data quality before committing.
For investors building their first probate pipeline, How to Build a Probate Investing Pipeline in Ohio walks through the process end to end. For the Pricing options, see Pricing.