Twelve months of for-sale-by-owner dials, measured per contact in the seller’s local time
The morning, and it is a clearer pattern than anything we see on expired listings. Contact rates for for-sale-by-owner sellers peak between 9am and 11am in the seller’s local time, with the nine o’clock hour standing alone at the top. Rates fall through the early afternoon, recover briefly around 5pm, and fade after that.
Monday is the best day. Friday is the weakest weekday, and the weekend sits below the working week.
A note on how these figures are measured, because it matters. Every rate in this study is a contact rate per contact called: of the FSBO sellers an agent dialed in a given hour, what share had a live Contact conversation in that hour (contact conversation is agent reported in Mojo, using any live conversation as a contact flag would result in much higher contact rates). We do not count each phone number dialed as its own denominator. A seller with three numbers who answers on the second is one contact reached, not one success out of three tries. This is the same correction we walk through in our contact rate benchmark study, and it roughly doubles the numbers you may have seen elsewhere without changing what actually happened on the phone.
Every finding, ranking and “best window” in this study is a conclusion drawn from measured platform data – what thousands of accounts’ own choices produced, in aggregate. Mojo is not recommending calling behaviour here. The data reports what it measured; decisions about lists, calling windows and cadence remain yours, made against the rules that apply to you.
FSBO sellers answer the phone far more readily than expired listing owners. Across the same twelve months on the same platform:
| List type | Contact rate | Live answer rate |
|---|---|---|
| Mojo FSBO | 20.4% | 62.5% |
| Mojo Expired | 9.9% | 53.2% |
Both columns are per contact called across the full year. The first is the share of called contacts who ever had a Contact conversation. The second is the share where any human picked up the phone.
A for-sale-by-owner seller is roughly 2.1 times more likely to have a live conversation with you than the owner of an expired listing, and more likely to pick up at all.
The reason is not mysterious. A FSBO seller has chosen to publish a phone number and is watching for calls about the property. An expired seller has just come off a listing that did not sell and has usually heard from a great many agents already.
This changes what the clock is worth: with a baseline that high, small timing gains translate into real conversation volume quickly.
All hours are the seller’s local time, derived from the property state. Each row reads: of the contacts called in this hour, what share were reached in this hour.
| Local hour | Contact rate | Index vs day average | Live answer rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8am | 13.0% | 1.08x | 61.7% |
| 9am | 16.3% | 1.35x | 63.1% |
| 10am | 14.1% | 1.17x | 58.7% |
| 11am | 12.5% | 1.03x | 54.0% |
| 12pm | 10.4% | 0.86x | 50.9% |
| 1pm | 9.6% | 0.79x | 49.7% |
| 2pm | 10.7% | 0.89x | 49.4% |
| 3pm | 11.2% | 0.93x | 49.3% |
| 4pm | 10.1% | 0.83x | 49.7% |
| 5pm | 12.9% | 1.07x | 55.3% |
| 6pm | 9.5% | 0.79x | 53.5% |
| 7pm | 12.0% | 0.99x | 51.5% |
The shape is clean. The 9am hour is the single best hour of the day, the 8-to-11 morning stretch is the best block, and the early afternoon between noon and two is the weakest working stretch.
That afternoon dip is worth noticing because it runs against the common advice to catch sellers “after lunch.” In this data, after lunch is the worst part of the working day for FSBO contact.
There is also a real secondary window at 5pm, running about 7% above the day average. If your mornings are committed elsewhere, the hour before dinner is the best remaining option – noticeably better than the mid-afternoon you would otherwise settle for.
9am to 11am in the seller’s local time is the highest-contact window this data measured, and it sits comfortably inside normal calling hours everywhere. Where mornings are unavailable, the 5pm hour measures ahead of the whole mid-afternoon. As everywhere in this study, that is the data’s ranking – the schedule built on it is yours.
| Weekday | Contact rate | Index |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | 13.5% | 1.09x |
| Wednesday | 12.8% | 1.02x |
| Tuesday | 12.7% | 1.02x |
| Thursday | 12.6% | 1.01x |
| Friday | 11.2% | 0.90x |
| Saturday | 9.8% | 0.79x |
| Sunday | 9.3% | 0.75x |
Monday is the best day. A FSBO seller who sat through a weekend of open house traffic, or no traffic at all, is at their most reachable and often their most reflective on Monday morning.
Friday is the weakest weekday, about 17% below Monday – in this data, it is the day that costs least to skip.
The weekend is the weakest part of the week. This is a correction to an earlier version of this study, and it is worth being open about why. Measured per dial, Saturday looked strong – but that turned out to be an artifact of the denominator. Saturday sessions dial fewer numbers per contact, which flatters a per-dial rate. Measured properly, per contact called, Saturday reaches sellers at about four fifths the weekday rate. Weekend volume is also thin (a few thousand contacts against tens of thousands on weekdays), so treat the weekend figures as directional. But the honest reading is that the data no longer supports a special case for Saturday calling.
The ranking below is the data’s. What to do with it is yours.
Every figure in this study is in the seller’s local time, not the caller’s. A 9am start from the mountain west into a Florida and Georgia list is an 11am arrival, and the back half of that block lands in the afternoon decline.
The arithmetic points one way: a list sorted by seller timezone and worked east to west keeps a session inside the strong window longer, and the sort costs nothing.
The data prices a move from the 1pm trough into the 9am peak at about a 70% relative improvement in contact rate. That is a genuinely large return for a scheduling change, and larger than the per-dial version of this data suggested.
But in the same data, a first attempt reaches a FSBO contact at 9.8% while a sixth attempt at the same contact runs 3.5%. Attempt effects dominate clock effects; in the data’s ordering, the cadence decision outranks the schedule decision.
Between 9am and 11am in the seller’s local time. The 9am hour is the single strongest, at 35% above the daily average, with a secondary window at 5pm. The weakest working stretch is noon to 2pm.
Monday, which runs about 9% above average and 17% ahead of Friday. The weekend underperforms the working week on a per-contact basis.
Considerably. In twelve months of Mojo data, 20.4% of called FSBO contacts had a live Contact conversation, against 9.9% for expired listings – about 2.1 times higher. FSBO sellers have chosen to publish a contact number, and the answer rates reflect it.
The data argues for the working week. Per contact called, Saturday and Sunday run 21 to 25 percent below the weekday average, though weekend volume is thin enough that the exact figures carry uncertainty.
Figures come from Mojo Dialer platform call records across roughly 9,400 Real Estate account databases, covering August 2025 through July 2026, limited to contacts sourced from the Mojo FSBO lead product. Absolute call volumes are withheld; rates and index values are reported instead.
Stated plainly, because this dataset is smaller than our expired study and readers deserve to know that.
