$300 on list data or four weekends in the car

We run both and the split isn't even close on cost per accepted lead. The list pulls cost us almost nothing per address and get rejected constantly. The drive routes cost real money per address and get accepted maybe a third of the time. Same client, same month.

The way I see it, the list is how you decide where to drive. Pull the filters, map the hits, then go look at the ones that cluster. You're not choosing between them so much as ordering them.

One thing before you spend anything, plumb. Whether you can take a fee for finding a property depends on how your state defines brokerage activity, and it varies a lot. Mine is strict enough that I'm waiting on the license before I take money for anything that looks like it. Worth an hour with a local attorney rather than finding out after the first check.

The answer turns on what your clients' buy criteria are actually keyed to.

If a client buys on condition, deferred maintenance, boarded openings, roof failure, then windshield time produces information county data does not carry. If a client buys on owner situation, absentee ownership, tax delinquency, long tenure with no permits pulled, the list is the better instrument because those are recorded fields. Ask each client which of the two they screen on before you spend a dollar. Most will tell you.

On the arithmetic. Four weekends is roughly 32 useful hours. Residential grid driving in a dense area yields something like 25 to 40 logged addresses an hour if you are only recording, more if you photograph less. Call it 900 addresses at the top end, and the fraction that are genuinely distressed rather than merely ugly is small, often single digits. Against that, $300 of data plus skip tracing might return several thousand filtered records where the filter has already done the first cut but every competitor has the same cut.

One constraint on the data path that catches people out: roughly a dozen states do not make sale prices public at all, so if you are in one of those, comp-based screening from a consumer list tool is thinner than the marketing suggests. Check what your county publishes before you subscribe.

Track cost per lead the client accepts, not cost per address collected. Those two numbers diverge fast, and the second one flatters whichever method is cheapest per row. That is the metric that will tell you which method to fund in month two.

cobalt has it in the right order. The list is a targeting layer, the drive is verification. I'd add that the thing you're selling isn't the address, it's the confidence that someone laid eyes on it. That's what makes an investor skip his own pipeline and look at yours.

The tarped roof and the dead yard are usually six months behind the actual problem. The owner stopped paying someone. By the time you can see it from the street, three other people have mailed the house. Doesn't make driving useless, it just means don't assume visible distress is undiscovered.

I did the $300 data version first because it felt like a business and driving felt like a hobby. Nine hundred records, sent 40 to an investor, he'd seen 31 of them. That was informative and expensive.

Four weekends is the part I'd protect. I've spent longer than that comparing subscription tiers and produced zero addresses.

Drive. Not because the leads are better but because you'll learn what your market's ugly houses actually look like, and you can't get that from a spreadsheet. The subscription will still be there in October.