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Research/Agent trade press

Sellers asking "why is my house not selling" now outnumber agents searching for expired listings

Three years ago, agents searched for expired listings about 1,188 times a month and sellers asked why their house wasn't selling 523 times. Now it's 575 agent searches (−52%) against 586 seller searches (+12%).

United States47 monthsAgent vs seller queries
Stagingmate Research
Published 2026-10-09
Method

Average monthly searches for each group per 12-month window, and quarterly averages for the timeline.

Sources
Google monthly search volume estimates, October 2022 to August 2026
Limits

Google reports rounded monthly search volumes, and very small volumes show as 10 or nothing, so small states and rare queries are noisy. Google may group close variants of a query. Search volume measures interest, not transactions. The plan called for a state-by-state ranking. Expired-listing searches average a few hundred a month nationally, and Google reports most states at its 10-search floor, so a state ranking would measure rounding rather than demand. This version reports the national picture.

Key findings

01Agent searches for expired listings fell 52% in three years, to 575 a month (−44% year over year).
02Seller searches like "why is my house not selling" changed +12% over the same period, to 586 a month.
03There are now 1.02 seller searches for every agent search, up from 0.44.
04Seller searches first outnumbered agent searches in Q2 2025.
05Over the same three years, searches for homes for sale changed −17%.
−52%

change in agent searches for expired listings, 2022–23 to 2025–26.

+12%

change in seller searches like "why is my house not selling".

0.44 → 1.02

seller searches per agent search, then and now.

Fewer agents hunting expireds, more sellers stuck

1.02

seller "house not selling" searches for every agent "expired listings" search, up from 0.44 three years ago.

QuarterAgent searches / monthSeller searches / month
Q4 2022917527
Q1 20231,407397
Q2 20231,207513
Q3 20231,223653
Q4 2023913530
Q1 20241,233493
Q2 20241,007850
Q3 20241,573880
Q4 20241,110640
Q1 20251,200617
Q2 2025893990
Q3 2025680950
Q4 2025563497
Q1 2026680450
Q2 2026543670

Expired-listing prospecting used to be a staple of agent lead generation. Searches for it have roughly halved. Meanwhile, sellers whose homes sit are asking Google what went wrong.

What this means for agents

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Cite this study

Stagingmate Research (2026). Sellers asking "why is my house not selling" now outnumber agents searching for expired listings. https://stagingmate.com/research/expired-listings-where-searches-for-expired-listing-agents-are-surging

Use our data

Free to use under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. For the full dataset or a local cut, email press@stagingmate.com.

About this study

Agent searches for them are down 52% in three years, while seller searches about unsold homes are +12%. Less competition for those sellers' attention may be an opportunity.

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