What percentage of public-record homeowner leads have a phone number?

3.9% — 12,660 of 323,184 records on file at BellAveGo as of 2026-10-07. The share depends almost entirely on the source: short-term-rental registries 24.9%, county deed filings 0.2%, code enforcement 0.1%.

Which public records include a homeowner phone number?

Short-term-rental registries. Cities require a contact to issue a rental permit, and several (Orlando, New Orleans among them) publish it. Deeds record the property and grantee, not a phone. Code-enforcement cases name the property; the respondent's contact is almost never published. Permits usually name the contractor, not the homeowner.

Why does a lead list of 50,000 homeowners rarely have 50,000 phone numbers?

Because the records it was built from have no phone field. A county deed does not record one; a code case does not either. Any phone attached to such a record was added by a separate trace, which succeeds for a minority of owners. Ask a list seller what share of records carry a phone, not how many records there are.

Original data · as of 2026-10-07 · CC BY 4.0, cite freely

Where homeowner phone numbers actually come from

Of 323,184 homeowner records BellAveGo holds from US public sources as of 2026-10-07, 12,660 (3.9%) carry a phone number. That share is not a data-quality problem; it is structural. Short-term-rental registries publish a contact for 24.9% of their records. County deed filings publish one for 0.2%; municipal code-enforcement cases for 0.1%. The record type decides whether the owner is reachable before anyone buys a list.

Phone availability by source class

Source class	Records	With a phone	Share	Why
Municipal code enforcement	172,637	135	0.1%	Case records name the property; respondent contact is almost never published.
County deed filings (new movers)	61,171	142	0.2%	A deed records the property and the grantee name. It has no phone field.
Short-term-rental registries	46,452	11,578	24.9%	Cities require a contact to issue a rental permit; several publish it.
Other public sources	30,072	770	2.6%	Inbound homeowner requests, 311, assessor feeds and smaller registries.
Building permits	12,852	35	0.3%	Permits name a contractor far more often than the homeowner.
All sources	323,184	12,660	3.9%

Download: data.csv · Cite as: BellAveGo (2026). Where homeowner phone numbers actually come from. https://www.bellavego.com/where-homeowner-phone-numbers-come-from

What this means if you buy or build lead lists

• Ask for the phone share, not the record count. 50,000 deed records at 0.2% is a mailing list. 2,000 rental registrations at 24.9% is a call list.
• Short-term-rental registries are the only public source that reliably publishes a contact, and a registered rental needs a turnover clean after every booking — a recurring buyer, reachable on day one.
• Everything else needs a trace, which costs money per record and succeeds for a minority of owners. That cost is why "homeowner leads with phones" are scarce and why the ones that exist are worth more than the ones that do not.

Method

Every record BellAveGo ingests from a public source is classified by the event that created it (a rental registration, a recorded deed, a code case, a permit) and marked as carrying a phone when the public record publishes one or a trace returns one. Counts above are exact as of 2026-10-07 and are refreshed when the snapshot is re-run. Records are deduplicated on address. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — republish with a link to this page.

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