The attempt curve, the caller ID ceiling, and where list hygiene actually pays
The curve says five, with a ceiling at ten. After five attempts at the same contact, the data shows about 89% of the live conversations that contact will ever produce have already happened. By ten attempts it is 96%, and everything past that is a rapidly shrinking return on a fixed cost.
That conclusion comes from tracking every dial to the same lead record by the same account across three months of expired and FSBO prospecting on Mojo - every number that contact has, combined. It is the data’s conclusion, not Mojo’s prescription: where to draw your own line is a judgement the figures can inform but not make.
An earlier version of this study counted attempts per phone number. This version counts attempts per contact, which is the number that actually matters: a seller with three phone numbers is one person, not three prospects. Measured per number, first-call capture looked like 69%. Measured per contact it is 53%, because multi-number contacts spread their attempts across lines. Same phone calls, honest denominator.
Every finding, cap and “efficient range” 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, cadence and volume remain yours, made against the rules that apply to you.
Here is what happens to your contact rate as you keep calling the same contact. Attempt number counts every dial to that contact, whichever of their numbers it went to.
| Attempt | Contact rate | vs first attempt |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 4.3% | 100% |
| 2nd | 3.1% | 72% |
| 3rd | 3.0% | 69% |
| 4th | 2.6% | 61% |
| 5th | 2.6% | 60% |
| 7th | 2.2% | 51% |
| 10th | 1.7% | 40% |
| 15th | 1.3% | 29% |
| 20th | 1.0% | 23% |
| 25th and beyond | 0.5% | 10% |
By the tenth attempt you are working at two fifths of first-attempt effectiveness. By the twenty-fifth you are at a tenth.
The decline is smooth and it never reverses. There is no hidden payoff at attempt twelve where persistence suddenly rewards you. The curve just goes down - though notice it is gentler than the folklore version: even attempt five still runs at 60% of a first attempt. Persistence within the first handful of attempts is well paid. Persistence past ten is not.
This is the finding we did not expect. Look at the same attempts, but measured on whether any human picked up:
| Attempt | Live answer rate | Contact rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 38.2% | 4.3% |
| 3rd | 34.6% | 3.0% |
| 5th | 34.1% | 2.6% |
| 10th | 32.2% | 1.7% |
| 20th | 30.5% | 1.0% |
Live answers barely decline with attempt count. What collapses is the conversion of an answer into an actual conversation with your prospect. On a tenth attempt someone still picks up a third of the time - but it is the spouse again, or a pickup that ends in seconds. The contact you are chasing has already decided.
That is the real argument for a cap. It is not that the phone goes dead. It is that repeated attempts spend your time re-reaching everyone around the decision you are trying to change.
Of every contact that eventually produced a live Contact conversation, here is the attempt on which that first conversation happened.
| First contact on attempt | Share | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 53.1% | 53.1% |
| 2nd | 18.4% | 71.5% |
| 3rd | 9.1% | 80.6% |
| 4th | 5.3% | 85.9% |
| 5th | 3.5% | 89.4% |
| 6th | 2.2% | 91.5% |
| 7th | 1.7% | 93.2% |
| 8th to 10th | 2.8% | 96.0% |
| 11th to 25th+ | 4.0% | 100% |
Over half of the contacts who ever talk to you, talk to you on the very first attempt. By the third attempt you have found four out of five of them. By the fifth, nine out of ten.
And if the question is simply whether you reach a live human at the contact’s numbers at all: 74.8% of contacts that ever produce a live answer do so on attempt one, and 98% within five.
This measures reaching a person, not winning the business. A seller who takes your call on attempt eight after ignoring seven may be a better prospect than one who answers immediately. We can measure contact, not outcome. Treat the cap as an efficiency ceiling, not a moral rule, and use judgment on individual contacts you have a reason to chase.
The data does not say stop - it says the identical repeat is what stops paying.
If a contact has not answered in five attempts spread across different times of day, a sixth identical attempt at the same hour is close to worthless. A sixth attempt in a different daypart is a genuinely different experiment. Our timing studies measure a meaningful gap between the best and worst hours, which makes the varied window the cheaper experiment before any increase in count - and the same logic extends across the contact’s numbers rather than repeating one line.
And one attempt outcome ends the experiment entirely. When someone asks not to be called again, that is not a redial candidate for a different daypart: the DNC dispositions exist to record exactly that request, and a record dispositioned DNC leaves your cadence for good.
List hygiene is usually discussed as a property of the list. There is a second kind that has nothing to do with your data and everything to do with the number you dial from.
Contact results per dial fall steadily as you push more dials per day through a single caller ID. These caller ID figures are per dial rather than per contact, because the thing being spent here is dials from a number; read them as relative comparisons between bands.
| Dials per caller ID per day | Contact results per dial | vs lightest band |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 50 | 5.9% | 100% |
| 51 to 100 | 5.1% | 86% |
| 101 to 200 | 4.6% | 78% |
| 201 to 300 | 4.2% | 71% |
| 301 to 500 | 3.6% | 61% |
| 501 to 800 | 3.1% | 53% |
| Over 800 | 2.1% | 36% |
An account pushing more than 800 dials a day through one number produces contact results at roughly a third the rate of an account keeping it under fifty.
Part of that is self selection. Agents who dial that hard tend to work harder lists. But the decline is smooth across every band, which is the signature of a real effect rather than a quirk of who sits in which bucket.
The practical reading: daily volume behind a single caller ID carries a measurable cost. The data prices the bands; the budgeting decision is yours.
Dials placed from numbers registered with the major carriers produce contact results at 4.2% per dial against 3.6% for unregistered numbers. That is a relative improvement of about a sixth, for something that requires no change to how you work.
Registration is not a cure for an over-dialed number or a tired list. It is one input among several - what it addresses is how the carriers label the number you chose to dial from, nothing more. But it is close to free and it moves the number.
Conventional wisdom says lead freshness is everything. Our data does not support that, at least not for reachability. Each row below is the share of called contacts reached, grouped by how old the contact record was when dialed.
| Age of the contact record when dialed | Contact rate |
|---|---|
| Same day | 7.4% |
| 1 to 3 days | 6.6% |
| 4 to 7 days | 6.0% |
| 8 to 14 days | 5.8% |
| 15 to 30 days | 6.1% |
| 31 to 90 days | 7.1% |
| 91 to 365 days | 7.3% |
| Over a year | 6.6% |
Same-day contacts do reach best. Then there is a shallow dip through the first month - and a full recovery after it. A contact that has sat in your database for six months reaches a live person at essentially the same rate as one that arrived this week, and slightly better than one from ten days ago.
That dip is not age wearing the contact out. It is the cadence: records one to four weeks old are exactly the ones in the middle of an active redial sequence, so their attempts skew toward the high-numbered, low-yield end of the curve. Once a record falls out of its cadence and rests, its reachability comes back.
This is a statement about reachability, not about value. Intent decays even when reachability does not, and a year-old expired contact is a different conversation from a fresh one. But it undercuts a common claim. If your old contacts are underperforming, the reason is that they have been dialed eleven times already, not that they have aged.
Attempt count, not calendar age, is what wears a list out.
Six patterns, each of them priced by the figures in this study. The conclusions are the data’s; whether and how to apply them is yours.
The data puts the efficient range at five to ten attempts: in three months of Mojo expired and FSBO data, 89.4% of contacts that ever produced a live conversation did so within five attempts, and 96% within ten. Where to draw your own line inside that range is a judgement the data can inform but not make.
Within the first five attempts, meaningfully - attempt five still converts at 60% of first-attempt effectiveness. Past ten, the marginal rate falls below half of a first attempt while live answers stay flat, which means you are mostly re-reaching the people around your prospect rather than the prospect.
No. Per contact called, reachability dips slightly in weeks one to four (while records are mid-cadence) and fully recovers after. What degrades a list is how many times its contacts have been dialed, not how long you have had them.
The data shows no single cliff - results per dial simply decline as daily volume on a number rises. Accounts staying under 50 dials per caller ID per day produce contact results at nearly three times the rate of those pushing past 800. How much volume to put behind each number is your call to make; the data only prices it.
Figures come from Mojo Dialer platform call records across roughly 9,400 Real Estate account databases, covering May, June and July 2026. Absolute call volumes are withheld; rates and ratios are reported instead.
The attempt curve, the caller ID ceiling, and where list hygiene actually pays
The curve says five, with a ceiling at ten. After five attempts at the same contact, the data shows about 89% of the live conversations that contact will ever produce have already happened. By ten attempts it is 96%, and everything past that is a rapidly shrinking return on a fixed cost.
That conclusion comes from tracking every dial to the same lead record by the same account across three months of expired and FSBO prospecting on Mojo - every number that contact has, combined. It is the data’s conclusion, not Mojo’s prescription: where to draw your own line is a judgement the figures can inform but not make.
An earlier version of this study counted attempts per phone number. This version counts attempts per contact, which is the number that actually matters: a seller with three phone numbers is one person, not three prospects. Measured per number, first-call capture looked like 69%. Measured per contact it is 53%, because multi-number contacts spread their attempts across lines. Same phone calls, honest denominator.
Every finding, cap and “efficient range” 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, cadence and volume remain yours, made against the rules that apply to you.
Here is what happens to your contact rate as you keep calling the same contact. Attempt number counts every dial to that contact, whichever of their numbers it went to.
| Attempt | Contact rate | vs first attempt |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 4.3% | 100% |
| 2nd | 3.1% | 72% |
| 3rd | 3.0% | 69% |
| 4th | 2.6% | 61% |
| 5th | 2.6% | 60% |
| 7th | 2.2% | 51% |
| 10th | 1.7% | 40% |
| 15th | 1.3% | 29% |
| 20th | 1.0% | 23% |
| 25th and beyond | 0.5% | 10% |
By the tenth attempt you are working at two fifths of first-attempt effectiveness. By the twenty-fifth you are at a tenth.
The decline is smooth and it never reverses. There is no hidden payoff at attempt twelve where persistence suddenly rewards you. The curve just goes down - though notice it is gentler than the folklore version: even attempt five still runs at 60% of a first attempt. Persistence within the first handful of attempts is well paid. Persistence past ten is not.
This is the finding we did not expect. Look at the same attempts, but measured on whether any human picked up:
| Attempt | Live answer rate | Contact rate |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 38.2% | 4.3% |
| 3rd | 34.6% | 3.0% |
| 5th | 34.1% | 2.6% |
| 10th | 32.2% | 1.7% |
| 20th | 30.5% | 1.0% |
Live answers barely decline with attempt count. What collapses is the conversion of an answer into an actual conversation with your prospect. On a tenth attempt someone still picks up a third of the time - but it is the spouse again, or a pickup that ends in seconds. The contact you are chasing has already decided.
That is the real argument for a cap. It is not that the phone goes dead. It is that repeated attempts spend your time re-reaching everyone around the decision you are trying to change.
Of every contact that eventually produced a live Contact conversation, here is the attempt on which that first conversation happened.
| First contact on attempt | Share | Cumulative |
|---|---|---|
| 1st | 53.1% | 53.1% |
| 2nd | 18.4% | 71.5% |
| 3rd | 9.1% | 80.6% |
| 4th | 5.3% | 85.9% |
| 5th | 3.5% | 89.4% |
| 6th | 2.2% | 91.5% |
| 7th | 1.7% | 93.2% |
| 8th to 10th | 2.8% | 96.0% |
| 11th to 25th+ | 4.0% | 100% |
Over half of the contacts who ever talk to you, talk to you on the very first attempt. By the third attempt you have found four out of five of them. By the fifth, nine out of ten.
And if the question is simply whether you reach a live human at the contact’s numbers at all: 74.8% of contacts that ever produce a live answer do so on attempt one, and 98% within five.
This measures reaching a person, not winning the business. A seller who takes your call on attempt eight after ignoring seven may be a better prospect than one who answers immediately. We can measure contact, not outcome. Treat the cap as an efficiency ceiling, not a moral rule, and use judgment on individual contacts you have a reason to chase.
The data does not say stop - it says the identical repeat is what stops paying.
If a contact has not answered in five attempts spread across different times of day, a sixth identical attempt at the same hour is close to worthless. A sixth attempt in a different daypart is a genuinely different experiment. Our timing studies measure a meaningful gap between the best and worst hours, which makes the varied window the cheaper experiment before any increase in count - and the same logic extends across the contact’s numbers rather than repeating one line.
And one attempt outcome ends the experiment entirely. When someone asks not to be called again, that is not a redial candidate for a different daypart: the DNC dispositions exist to record exactly that request, and a record dispositioned DNC leaves your cadence for good.
List hygiene is usually discussed as a property of the list. There is a second kind that has nothing to do with your data and everything to do with the number you dial from.
Contact results per dial fall steadily as you push more dials per day through a single caller ID. These caller ID figures are per dial rather than per contact, because the thing being spent here is dials from a number; read them as relative comparisons between bands.
| Dials per caller ID per day | Contact results per dial | vs lightest band |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 50 | 5.9% | 100% |
| 51 to 100 | 5.1% | 86% |
| 101 to 200 | 4.6% | 78% |
| 201 to 300 | 4.2% | 71% |
| 301 to 500 | 3.6% | 61% |
| 501 to 800 | 3.1% | 53% |
| Over 800 | 2.1% | 36% |
An account pushing more than 800 dials a day through one number produces contact results at roughly a third the rate of an account keeping it under fifty.
Part of that is self selection. Agents who dial that hard tend to work harder lists. But the decline is smooth across every band, which is the signature of a real effect rather than a quirk of who sits in which bucket.
The practical reading: daily volume behind a single caller ID carries a measurable cost. The data prices the bands; the budgeting decision is yours.
Dials placed from numbers registered with the major carriers produce contact results at 4.2% per dial against 3.6% for unregistered numbers. That is a relative improvement of about a sixth, for something that requires no change to how you work.
Registration is not a cure for an over-dialed number or a tired list. It is one input among several - what it addresses is how the carriers label the number you chose to dial from, nothing more. But it is close to free and it moves the number.
Conventional wisdom says lead freshness is everything. Our data does not support that, at least not for reachability. Each row below is the share of called contacts reached, grouped by how old the contact record was when dialed.
| Age of the contact record when dialed | Contact rate |
|---|---|
| Same day | 7.4% |
| 1 to 3 days | 6.6% |
| 4 to 7 days | 6.0% |
| 8 to 14 days | 5.8% |
| 15 to 30 days | 6.1% |
| 31 to 90 days | 7.1% |
| 91 to 365 days | 7.3% |
| Over a year | 6.6% |
Same-day contacts do reach best. Then there is a shallow dip through the first month - and a full recovery after it. A contact that has sat in your database for six months reaches a live person at essentially the same rate as one that arrived this week, and slightly better than one from ten days ago.
That dip is not age wearing the contact out. It is the cadence: records one to four weeks old are exactly the ones in the middle of an active redial sequence, so their attempts skew toward the high-numbered, low-yield end of the curve. Once a record falls out of its cadence and rests, its reachability comes back.
This is a statement about reachability, not about value. Intent decays even when reachability does not, and a year-old expired contact is a different conversation from a fresh one. But it undercuts a common claim. If your old contacts are underperforming, the reason is that they have been dialed eleven times already, not that they have aged.
Attempt count, not calendar age, is what wears a list out.
Six patterns, each of them priced by the figures in this study. The conclusions are the data’s; whether and how to apply them is yours.
The data puts the efficient range at five to ten attempts: in three months of Mojo expired and FSBO data, 89.4% of contacts that ever produced a live conversation did so within five attempts, and 96% within ten. Where to draw your own line inside that range is a judgement the data can inform but not make.
Within the first five attempts, meaningfully - attempt five still converts at 60% of first-attempt effectiveness. Past ten, the marginal rate falls below half of a first attempt while live answers stay flat, which means you are mostly re-reaching the people around your prospect rather than the prospect.
No. Per contact called, reachability dips slightly in weeks one to four (while records are mid-cadence) and fully recovers after. What degrades a list is how many times its contacts have been dialed, not how long you have had them.
The data shows no single cliff - results per dial simply decline as daily volume on a number rises. Accounts staying under 50 dials per caller ID per day produce contact results at nearly three times the rate of those pushing past 800. How much volume to put behind each number is your call to make; the data only prices it.
Figures come from Mojo Dialer platform call records across roughly 9,400 Real Estate account databases, covering May, June and July 2026. Absolute call volumes are withheld; rates and ratios are reported instead.
