You missed the meeting, or you want it again. Either way, this is the whole thing: the searches, the scripts, the rules, and the homework. Work through it at your own pace.
This is not a software class. Nobody needs another complicated system right now. What you need is a repeatable way to find someone worth talking to on a morning when the pipeline is empty.
There are people all over Southeast Idaho with a question, a transition, a problem, or an opportunity. Most of them have not raised their hand yet. Our job is to get better at noticing them, and better at starting a conversation that is genuinely useful to them.
RPR is the tool we happen to be using to do that. If all you take from this is "Rick showed us RPR," I wasted your morning. What I want you leaving with is: I know how to find someone I can help, and I know how to open the conversation.
Realtors Property Resource. Owned and funded by the National Association of Realtors, included in your dues, and almost nobody in our market uses it.
RPR takes just over 100 public databases and pulls them into one place so you are not bouncing between the county GIS, the assessor, deed records, school ratings, and census data. Property records, ownership, mortgages, deeds, taxes, schools, demographics, market trends.
It also carries mail carrier routes, which I used to joke that nobody understood. There is actually a good reason: carrier routes are how you target USPS Every Door Direct Mail, which lets you hit an entire route without a name list at a fraction of first-class postage. That is directly useful to the farming we are about to talk about.
Here is what came up when I asked the room what they already use it for. Comps and CMAs for listing appointments. Market research, sales numbers month to month, transaction counts year over year. One agent made a point worth repeating: even when it feels slow, the numbers often say it is not as slow as it feels. Some of this business is a mental battle more than a market battle. Others use it to show buyers every property around a house while standing in front of it, to generate social media graphics off the market report, and to fill in legal descriptions, parcel numbers, school assignments, and square footage by floor when inputting listings.
Somebody asked whether RPR solves all your problems. The honest answer from the room was that it solves all the problems we do not cause for ourselves. It will not bring you business on its own. You still have to do something with it.
Correction from the meeting: we said the MLS sets up your RPR account and pays for it. That is wrong, and that is Forewarn. RPR you create yourself.
Go to narrpr.com, click Create a New Account, and verify with your last name and your NAR member ID, which is on your membership card. NAR funds it, so there is no cost and nobody to ask. If it cannot find you, RPR support is 877-977-7576 and will build it on the phone.
The signup asks for your Snake River MLS agent ID. That is what makes MLS listing data appear in your account, and an invalid ID means you see no listing data at all.
This matters more here than most places. Idaho is a non-disclosure state, so sale prices come from the MLS, not the county. Skip that field and you get an RPR with no sold prices, which guts both searches below.
Different tool, different process, separate login. The MLS provisions that one, so email membership at Snake River MLS and ask them to activate your subscription.
Read section 08 before you use it. It has real limits on what it is for.
Idaho does not make sale price a public record. Almost everything on this page is shaped by that. It is why the MLS ID field matters, why the automated values here have wider ranges than agents in other states are used to, and why a purchase price you see in RPR is usually coming from an old MLS listing rather than the county. Anything that last sold for sale by owner, builder direct, or between family may show no price at all.
Also worth knowing: RPR is thin on commercial. New development parcels frequently have no record you can click at all, no deed and no plat. When that happens, go to the county GIS for ownership. Madison, Fremont, Jefferson, and Bonneville all publish parcel viewers. New construction and raw land are exactly where our growth is and exactly where RPR is weakest.
I am not going to teach you every button. If we spend our time on menus you will leave knowing where things are and still not know how to create business with them. Everything on this page runs on one sequence.
Who owns it, when they bought, whether there is a mortgage. On its own this is trivia.
Something in the record clicks and gives you a reason to reach out that is not "want to sell?"
You call, knock, or mail. Lead with what is useful to them. This is the link everyone skips.
Most of these will not close this month. One agent's favor from three years ago just paid off.
You do not control when somebody inherits a house. Only whether you are who they call.
There is no skipping a link. Everybody wants the quick lead, and the entire ad industry is built on selling that fantasy. Google and Facebook make their money because agents want leads without relationships.
One habit that came out of that: when you meet someone and get their name, friend them on Facebook before you get back to your car. Not as friends, as acquaintances. You will never see the post about their basement flooding or their job transfer if you are not connected. And when you show up at a Chamber event, showing up is not the win. Trading contact information is, because that is the only thing that lets you invite them to the next thing.
Nobody is going to hand you a list of who is selling next week. But you can find people who have a legitimate reason to talk.
The question I opened with in the room was simple: where do leads actually come from? The first answers were the ones everybody gives, circle of influence and referrals. So we kept pushing a layer deeper. What causes that person to become a lead in the first place?
Notice what almost none of those are. They are not real estate events. They are life events. Money showing up, or money needing somewhere to go. A family growing or shrinking. A death. A job. A house that stopped fitting. One seller we heard about is moving because the neighbor practices with his band in the garage every day.
Here is the part that is easy to get wrong. You cannot search for most of that. There is no checkbox in RPR for growing family, empty nest, inheritance, or a home that no longer fits. Nobody publishes that data. If they did, we would all have a different job.
What RPR gives you is a short list of real filters, and then a property record you have to read like a person. Here is which is which:
No filter finds you equity, and the record will not confirm it. You are building an educated guess from an MLS-sourced price and a lien record that may be out of date. Good enough to justify a question. Never good enough to say out loud as fact.
This is what you are actually listening for. It is the reason the call exists.
The filters just tell you who to call first. Everything that matters comes out of the call.
Two notes on that first column. A failed or expired listing is not a public records filter, that one is an MLS search. And the distressed filter, pre-foreclosure through foreclosed, is real and it works off recorded notices, which makes it one of the more reliable public record signals we have in a state where prices are not. Volume in our counties is thin and it carries the heaviest compliance load of anything in the tool, so I am going to teach that one on its own rather than hand it to you with a script today.
The data gives you a clue. It does not give you permission to assume.
One number worth holding onto: the average owner sells every five to seven years. That is not a prediction about any single house. It is the reason a filter on time owned is worth running at all.
Nobody expected to spend twenty minutes on where to go find these people, and it turned into the most honest part of the day. More than one person named community involvement as the thing that changed their business most, and the two approaches described were opposites. One agent is reserved, never brings up real estate, wears the shirt to everything and lets people connect the dots. Another tells everyone every chance she gets. Both work.
Showing up and leaving without contact information does nothing. If you meet somebody, trade numbers, because that is the only thing that lets you invite them to the next thing. It does not have to be about real estate. Line dancing counts.
You get asked this constantly, at church, at the ball field, at the Chamber lunch. Most of the time we answer on autopilot and waste it.
Here is what people in the room admitted they say. "Great, but a little slow." "People still want to move here." "It's horrible," said as a joke to break the tension. Those are fine answers and they are all a dead end. The conversation closes right there.
Instead: "Can I show you something kind of crazy?" Then hand them your phone.
I said in the meeting that trends knows where you are standing. That is the map screen, not trends. Trends needs a location, so set it up ahead of time. Open the app, tap Trends, search Rexburg, and tap the heart to save it to My Markets. Then do Idaho Falls, Ammon, St. Anthony, Rigby, Ashton, and Island Park. Four minutes, one time.
Now it genuinely is two taps anywhere you are standing, with no setup in the moment and no numbers to memorize. Trends, pick the market, hand them the phone.
Then the part that matters most, and it solves a problem section 09 is about to hand you. RPR can text the chart. "Want me to send you this?" If they say yes and give you their number, you did not pull that number off a record. They handed it to you, and they just inquired. That is completely different footing for following up, and it is the cleanest lead capture on this page.
On August 11 the live numbers showed our market had crossed into a buyer's market while sold-to-list was still running around 99.1 percent. That combination tells you something specific: inventory has turned but sellers have not repriced yet, which is exactly the conversation worth having. Pull your own numbers before you quote any of that, because having live data is the entire point.
One limitation to know before you hand somebody your phone. Transaction charts need three or more sales in a calendar month to render at all, and small neighborhoods only look back three months. In a micro-area like a single Island Park subdivision you may get an empty chart.
You woke up with nothing in the pipeline. Renters may be ready to buy and landlords may be tired of being landlords. This finds both groups at once. Do it with the page open.
You now have the renters and the owners. The tenants get a door knock or a mailer asking whether they are getting tired of paying rent and want to see what buying looks like. The owners get a separate conversation about what their equity has done. One search, two different sets of people you can help.
Your sellers outgrew their house after seven years. Statistically, other families on that street are in the same spot. Here is how to find them and get a mailing list out of it.
Buy a card for your sellers, then walk the neighborhood asking neighbors to write them a goodbye note since they are moving. People say yes, because it is a genuinely nice thing to be asked. While they are writing, you are standing there having a real conversation. They see your face. It has worked twice for the agent who suggested it, and it carries none of the restrictions in the next two sections.
One mailer does nothing. Farming is six to twelve touches over twelve months, mixing mail, door knocking, and the market update you are already pulling. If you are not willing to commit to a year in one neighborhood, work a smaller neighborhood.
Half the good investment properties are owned by something like "Westbound Holdings LLC." That is not a dead end. It is two extra minutes.
Go to sos.idaho.gov and run a business entity search. Paste the entity name from RPR and drop the "LLC" off the end so the search is less picky.
Open the filing, go to History, then open the most recent annual report. The owner's mailing address is on it. Every state has one of these.
Sometimes that address belongs to a registered agent, not a person. The tell is the field itself: the registered agent appears under its own heading and is often a law firm or a registration service, so a business name there means keep going.
Work backward through older filings. I have never had a person I could not find.
Once you have the entity name, search it in RPR's Owner Name filter. That surfaces every property that owner holds in the county, not just the one you started on. One conversation about a portfolio beats one conversation about a single unit.
Forewarn comes through your Snake River MLS membership and it is a mobile app, which is why most people do not know they have it. Email membership and ask them to activate your subscription.
Read this next part carefully, because it is the one rule on this page that can get your access shut off.
Forewarn is licensed for one purpose: verifying an inbound prospect who contacted you first, so you know who you are meeting before you get in a car or open an empty house. Their terms prohibit using it for marketing or lead generation, prohibit looking up friends, family, neighbors, and public figures, and prohibit any personal or household use. Forewarn monitors every search, by term and by volume, and can suspend or terminate access.
So do not use it to source a phone number for a prospecting call, do not look up your in-laws, and do not screenshot a report or repeat what is in it. If you need to reach an owner you found in a public records search, use the mailing address or knock on the door.
What it is genuinely for: somebody calls you off a sign, wants to see a vacant house tonight, and you have never met them. Run them. Search by the phone number they called from, or by name plus city. You get identity confirmation, address history, vehicles, and criminal records. If they roll up in a vehicle that appears nowhere on the record, verify who they are before you go anywhere with them.
Forewarn returns strong and weak matches, and weak ones may belong to somebody else entirely. An agent on the team found an address on a family member's profile that had nothing to do with him, because a company had mailed something with his name to an address it owned and a data broker pinned it to him. Watch the match strength and never accuse anyone of anything based on a report.
Forewarn is not a consumer reporting agency and its terms say results may not be used as a factor in deciding eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or anything similar. Records lag. Cleared bankruptcies still show up. Use it to plan how you meet somebody, never to tell a prospect they do not qualify.
Everything above helps you find somebody. This decides whether contacting them is a good idea or a lawsuit.
The national Do Not Call registry applies to us. There is no exemption for real estate agents. Under Idaho law it is separately unlawful to call an Idaho number that is on the federal registry, so there is state exposure on top of federal. Damages run $500 to $1,500 per call and consumers can sue directly, so a forty-name list is a five-figure problem if you get it wrong.
You do not have an established business relationship with a stranger. You can call a past client for 18 months after their transaction, and somebody who inquired with you for 3 months after they reached out. An owner you found in a public records search is neither.
Scrub the list, and rescrub every 31 days. RPR does not do this for you. Come to me before your first campaign so we run it through the brokerage rather than five different ways.
Texting is calling. So is a voicemail drop, and so is a call from your personal cell. Calling hours are 8am to 9pm local.
RPR suppresses owner phone numbers that are on the national Do Not Call registry, so a number showing on a property record is a much smaller and safer set than most agents assume. That is helpful. It is not a substitute for scrubbing your own list, and phone numbers are not part of the mailing label export, so do not build a calling workflow around finding them.
Standard of Practice 16-4 prohibits soliciting a listing currently listed exclusively with another broker. Both searches above run in Public Record, which is exactly the view that does not show listing status, so your list will contain homes listed with other Snake River brokerages. Cross-check every list against active and pending in the MLS and pull those out before you contact anybody. Pull anyone inside another broker's protection period on a recently expired listing too.
Mail. Door knocking. In person. Social media. And any conversation with somebody who asked you first. That is where most of the plays on this page should live. The goodbye card in section 07 is not just nicer than a cold call, it is cleaner. On a mailer, put the brokerage name on it, which Idaho requires on advertising, and include the standard line: this is not intended as a solicitation of property currently listed for sale.
And the easiest legal path to a phone number is still the one in section 05. Show somebody the trends on your phone and ask whether they want you to text it to them. If they say yes and hand you the number, you have consent and an inquiry, and you are on entirely different footing than if you pulled it off a record.
Every one follows the same rule. You never open with "do you want to sell." You open with "I noticed something that might be useful to you."
If you are using any of these on the phone, the rules in Before you dial apply. Mail and door knocking do not carry the same restrictions, and in a town this size they will usually outperform a cold call anyway.
Do not ask whether they want to sell. Ask whether they would like to know what their equity looks like. It is a far easier question to say yes to, and it ends with you running a report, which means you now have a reason to follow up.
Every one of these scripts ends with you offering something. This is where they leak. Get the report out within 24 hours, delivered with the one thing highlighted rather than as a 24-page attachment, and offer one specific next step. Then put the contact in the CRM with a next-action date before you do anything else. Five conversations with nothing logged evaporates by Friday, and the compounding this whole page is built on never happens.
A live room surfaces these in five minutes. Alone at your desk you find them one at a time, on real calls, badly.
| They say | You say |
|---|---|
| "How did you get my number?" | Answer it straight, because hedging is what makes it sound wrong. "Property ownership is public record, and phone numbers show up on some of those records. If you would rather I not call again, just say so and you are off my list for good." Then honor it immediately. |
| "I'm not interested." | Do not push. "Totally fair, I will not keep you. If it is ever useful, I can send you what homes in your neighborhood are actually selling for, no obligation. Want me to?" One ask, then out. |
| "We already have an agent." | This is your stop sign, not an objection. "Then you are in good hands and I will let you go. Have a good one." If their home is currently listed, do not continue, do not leave the door open, and do not follow up. That is Article 16. |
| "Just email me something." | Take it, and pin it down. "Happy to. What is the best email? And so I send something useful instead of junk, are you more curious about what your place is worth or what is happening in the neighborhood?" Now you have an inquiry and a reason to follow up. |
| "How do you know that about me?" | Section 12 handles this one in full, because it deserves more than a line. |
A seller called me about a property she owns here in town. I was in a meeting so I texted back, and she mentioned they were thinking about selling. I replied asking whether it was that specific address, because I already knew which property was hers. She went quiet.
Here is the answer. Not defensive, not apologetic:
"You know, there is so much fraud in real estate these days, and we do a lot to keep our buyers and sellers protected. So we do have databases with all kinds of information, to protect you and to protect us."
She went from fists clenched to "oh, okay" in one sentence, and I eventually took the listing. It works because it is true. Every bit of it is public record and you could find the same thing at the county. Do not act embarrassed about knowing your market, and do not deflect to Zillow. Position your access as protection for the client, because that is genuinely one of the main reasons we have it.
One of the most dangerous questions a buyer can ask you. RPR helps here, but not the way people assume.
RPR does not make the question safe to answer. It gives you a way to answer a narrower, better question. Standard of Practice 10-1 is the line: you may not volunteer information about the racial, religious, or ethnic composition of a neighborhood, and you may provide other demographic information. So there is a set of things you can walk a buyer through, and a set of things you close the laptop on.
Do not read these out loud, do not print them in something you hand a buyer, do not paraphrase them, and do not say "well, according to RPR."
The steering risk is not only in what you say, it is in who you say it to. If you pull neighborhood data for one buyer, pull the same data the same way for every buyer. Never let somebody's answer to "what's it like here" change which neighborhoods you show them.
There is a belief in this business that fair housing applies while you are on the property and stops once you are in the car, or that saying "off the record" or "as a friend, not as your agent" moves you somewhere safer. It does not. Liability attaches to the statement, not the address. You are the same licensee in the driveway, in the car, in a text at nine at night, and at a barbecue. Testers record and buyers repeat things. If a question is one you cannot answer inside the house, the answer outside the house is the same answer.
RPR gives you an automated value with a star confidence rating and a high and low range. In the training that range ran from about $804,000 to $963,000, with the estimate in the middle.
That spread is not random. Five stars means the sale lands within about 10 percent of the estimate most of the time, and each star down widens it. In a non-disclosure state like ours the model is leaning on MLS data rather than recorded sale prices, so expect lower star counts, wider ranges, and rural properties with no estimate at all. Quoting the middle number as if it is the answer is how you lose a seller's confidence.
Somebody pointed out that if you ask ChatGPT to value the same house it lands remarkably close. Not surprising, and not the point. Neither one walked through the house. Decide what you would adjust before you flip these.
Your value is not knowing how to generate a number. Your value is knowing when the number does not tell the whole story.
Same applies to the AI shortcut, and it came up. One agent asked ChatGPT to find every property in a subdivision that changed ownership three to four years ago, with addresses, parcel numbers, and transfer dates, and it built him a spreadsheet with median and high values and a suggested priority order. Legitimate tool. Use both. What RPR still has is every property record, mortgage, tax bill, and mailing label already attached, which matters the moment you want to send something.
RPR will generate something beautiful in one click. That is exactly why it is easy to misuse.
Do not email somebody a 24-page PDF with "thought you might find this interesting." That sentence hands the client a homework assignment: figure out for yourself why this matters. Most people will not open it, and the ones who do will not know what they are looking at.
"Here is an RPR market report for your neighborhood. Thought you might find it interesting."
"I was looking at what has happened in your neighborhood and one thing surprised me. I pulled the numbers because I thought they might be useful to you."
Then tell them the one thing. Not all twelve. The report is the evidence behind your point, not the point.
The other habit worth copying came from a listing appointment veteran on the team. She prints the CMA, pulls out the pages she does not like, and puts only what she wants to present into a folder with a bow on it. Half the time the clients say "just do whatever you're supposed to do" and never open it. She still does it, because walking in prepared changes how she shows up. And she always includes actives alongside solds, because actives are the competition, which sets up her real point: if you want to be competitive in this market and you want people to stop looking at other houses, it comes down to price.
Ask who would benefit from this report even if they are not moving this year. A past client. Somebody in your sphere. An investor. A neighbor. A nervous buyer who thinks they missed their window. The report is a reason to call, not a substitute for calling.
Small enough that you will actually do it on a bad day. That is the only reason it works.
Put 15 minutes in RPR on your calendar. Each session, pick one question below and answer it. Do not try to do all eight. Pick two this week and check them off. Your progress saves in this browser.
Do not close RPR until you have one person you could reasonably contact and one useful reason to contact them.
And save your searches while you are in there. Draw an area, save it, and it becomes reusable from the saved area dropdown. A search you have to rebuild from scratch is a search you will run once.
One assignment, one week. Five conversations, using RPR as the tool. A conversation means a two-way exchange with somebody outside your household where you showed them something from RPR.
Fills in from your work above. Send it to me when you have it, because we are going to go around the room at the next office meeting.
Saved in this browser only, so if you fill this in at the office it will not follow you to your truck. Send it to yourself or to me and it is out of the browser and real.
Every property in every search on this page is a person. The job is not to convince everyone to sell. The job is to know your market well enough to notice when somebody needs help.
RPR can help you find the opportunity. You still create the relationship.
At the end of the training everyone named what they are actually struggling with. These are the next trainings, and we will start each one by going around the room on the five conversations from this one.
It has been too long since we ran one. Next office meeting.
Named as the hardest part of the job. How to set expectations early without losing the listing.
Inspection periods, buyer representation paperwork, what goes in the back office, and what we expect from you.
Questions on anything here, or you want to sit down and run a search together, come find me. [email protected] or (208) 360-4688.