TCPA basics for investors who call and text sellers

By Martin Okafor, October 5, 2026

Most investors learn about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act from a demand letter. It's a 1991 law, but it carries statutory damages, and that's what makes it dangerous to a small team that texts a few thousand numbers a month.

Here's what you actually need to know.

What the law restricts

The core of the TCPA is in 47 U.S.C. section 227. For an investor, three restrictions matter.

First, you can't call a cell phone using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice unless you have the person's prior express consent. For telemarketing calls with a prerecorded voice, the bar is higher: prior express written consent.

Second, the FCC treats text messages as calls for these purposes. If a text platform would count as an autodialer, the same consent rules apply to your texts.

Third, there are rules about who you can solicit at all, through the Do Not Call Registry, and when. The FCC's regulations at 47 CFR 64.1200 limit telephone solicitations to between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the called person's time zone.

Why the numbers get big

The statute lets people sue for $500 per violation, and a court can triple that to $1,500 if the violation was willful or knowing. Each call or text can be a separate violation.

Do the math on a campaign that texts 2,000 numbers three times each. If even a small slice of those numbers belonged to people who never agreed to anything, the exposure adds up fast, which is why TCPA class actions exist as a business model.

Is buying a house even telemarketing?

This is the part investors argue about. Telemarketing generally means encouraging someone to buy goods, services or property. An investor offering to buy someone's house is arguably doing the opposite. Courts haven't treated these calls consistently, and some of the rules, like the autodialer and prerecorded voice limits on cell phones, apply whether or not a call is telemarketing.

The practical answer most compliance people give: assume the rules apply and run your outreach as if they do. Winning an argument about definitions in court is still expensive.

Consent means the person agreed to be contacted at that number, and for written consent, that they signed or clicked something that clearly said so. It should name who's going to contact them. A form that says "a partner may call you" is weaker than one that names the business.

Keep records. If a seller filled out a form, you want the date, the page, the wording they agreed to and the number they gave. If you can't produce that, assume you don't have it.

Consent can also be taken back. A seller who texts "stop" or says "don't call me again" has revoked it, and you need a way to honor that across every phone number and platform your team uses.

Prerecorded messages, voicemail drops and AI voices

Investors love tools that leave a recorded message without making the phone ring. The FCC has said that ringless voicemail counts as a call under the TCPA, so the same consent rules for prerecorded messages apply. In 2024 the FCC also confirmed that AI-generated voices count as artificial voices under the statute.

In practice that means a prerecorded or AI-voiced message to a cell phone needs prior express consent, and for telemarketing, prior express written consent. If a vendor sells you a voicemail-drop product as a way around the TCPA, be skeptical. The safer pattern is a live caller who leaves a short, personal voicemail.

Numbers change hands

People drop phone numbers and carriers reassign them. If you call a number that used to belong to a seller who consented, the new owner didn't. The FCC set up the Reassigned Numbers Database so callers can check whether a number has been disconnected since a given date. Using it can give you a safe harbor for calls to numbers that were reassigned anyway.

What a careful investor does

Uses a texting or dialing setup that a lawyer has looked at, not just a vendor's marketing page.
Calls only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the seller's time zone.
Logs consent and opt-outs in one place that every caller and every tool reads from.
Scrubs cold lists against the Do Not Call Registry and an internal do-not-call list.
Treats inbound leads differently from cold lists, without assuming inbound means unlimited consent.

That last point is where lead sourcing comes in. Inbound leads, where the seller filled out a form or called a number, start from a different place than a scraped list. A source like CalOffers sells leads where the seller reached out first, but you still need to understand what each seller agreed to and from whom.

For the consumer side of these rules, the FCC's guide to stopping unwanted robocalls and texts is a quick read and shows you how sellers see your outreach. If you have questions about a specific lead source's process, start with the CalOffers FAQ or whatever your vendor publishes, and ask them directly.

This memo is general information, not legal advice. TCPA law moves through the courts constantly, and a lawyer should review any outreach program you rely on.

Martin Okafor wrote call-center compliance policies for nine years before he started advising small real estate acquisition teams. He is not a lawyer and says so often.