Real Estate Agents: How to Verify Lead Emails and Phone Numbers Before You Text or Send

Why real estate lists are messier than most

An agent's contacts come from places that were never designed to collect clean data:

• Open house sign-in sheets. Written by hand or typed on a tablet in a hurry. gmial.com, missing digits and a "phone" that is a street number all turn up.
• Portal inquiries. People inquiring about a listing sometimes give a throwaway email or a number they never answer, because they don't want a call yet.
• Sphere of influence. Past clients, friends, the old brokerage's database. Accurate once, ageing every year: people move (it's your job to help them), change jobs and drop old email accounts.
• Purchased or farmed lists. Expired listings, FSBO and neighbourhood farms. The quality varies by vendor and you rarely know when the data was last checked.

Each source fails in its own way, which is why you check them separately. If you merge first, one bad source drags the whole list down and you can't tell which one it was.

Step 1: clean the file before you check it

Export each source to CSV. Before uploading anything:

• Keep phone numbers as text. Excel drops leading zeros and can show long numbers as 4.15555E+09. Open the file with the import wizard and set the phone column to Text, or upload it untouched. More in validate phone numbers in Excel.
• One email and one phone per cell. Sign-in sheets often hold "[email protected] / [email protected]". Split those with the split multiple emails in a cell tool.
• Fix obvious typos. The email typo corrector catches gmial.com, yaho.com and similar domain slips that a busy open house produces.

Step 2: verify the emails

Upload the file to the verify page. SimpleVerifier finds the email column and runs a live SMTP mailbox check on every address: it asks the receiving mail server whether that mailbox exists, without sending an email. Each row comes back as:

Result	What it means	What to do
Valid	The mail server accepted this mailbox	Send
Invalid	The mailbox or domain doesn't exist	Remove, or call instead
Risky	Catch-all domain, full inbox, role address or similar	Decide per lead
Unknown	The server didn't give a usable answer	Re-check later

Catch-all domains accept mail for any address, so no checker can confirm the person behind one. SimpleVerifier reports them as risky and never guesses them valid, with a higher, medium or lower likelihood grade (how the grading works). For a past client you know well, a risky result is fine to send. For a cold portal lead, it's a reason to call first.

Step 3: validate the phone numbers

The same upload checks phone columns. For every number you get:

• Status: can this number exist in its country's numbering plan? Too short, too long and unallocated ranges fail.
• E.164 format: + and country code, nothing else, which is what most CRMs and texting tools want.
• Country and numbering-plan type where the plan defines it (mobile, fixed line, toll-free, VoIP).

Numbers without a country code are read as US numbers. If you work with overseas buyers, add country codes first with the add or remove country code tool.

Then run a quick sanity pass for made-up numbers. People who don't want a call type 555-555-5555, 123-456-7890 or a number from a fictional range. The fake phone number checker flags those, along with repeated digits and straight runs.

Step 4: find the mobiles before you text

In the US and Canada, a mobile and a landline can share the same area code and exchange, so the digits don't tell you which is which. If you plan to text, you need a live carrier lookup, which returns the carrier and the line type it reports today: mobile, landline or VoIP. That also catches numbers that were ported from a landline to a mobile or the other way round.

Check one number with the landline or mobile checker. For the background, see mobile vs landline lookup and can you text a landline.

Step 5: consent and Do Not Call are separate jobs

Verification tells you whether a message can arrive. It says nothing about whether you're allowed to send it:

• Calls and texts. In the US, autodialed calls and texts to mobiles generally need prior consent under the TCPA, and cold calls need a Do Not Call scrub. See TCPA: mobile vs landline and scrub a list against the Do Not Call registry. The TCPA calling hours checker helps with timing.
• Email to Canadian or EU contacts. CASL and GDPR have their own consent rules. The free CASL consent checker works out when implied consent from an inquiry expires, and the GDPR email consent checker walks through the sending rule per contact.

This isn't legal advice. Check with your brokerage's compliance contact.

Step 6: merge, dedupe and import

Once each source is clean, merge them and dedupe on the formatted values: (415) 555-2671 and +1 415 555 2671 only match after both are E.164. The remove duplicate phone numbers and remove duplicate emails tools handle that. Then import only valid emails and valid numbers into your CRM, and keep a column saying when each row was checked.

How often to re-check

• New leads: at the moment they arrive, if your form or CRM can call an API. The API checks one email or number at a time.
• Sphere and past clients: before each big campaign, or at least twice a year.
• Purchased lists: always, before the first send.

What it costs

• Free: 100 checks with a Google sign-in, no card. Enough to test one open house sheet.
• Starter, $9 a month: 2,500 emails a month for small, email-only lists.
• Pro, $39 a month: Unlimited email verification*, phone format checks on every row, the email finder, the API and the MCP server for AI assistants.
• Pro + Phone, $49.99 a month: adds 5,000 live carrier lookups a month for mobile vs landline.

*Fair use: the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off.

See pricing for the details, or start at /verify.

More reading: email list hygiene for real estate agents, verify emails and phone numbers together, clean phone numbers in a CSV.