Paid $890 for a skip trace list where 84% of the numbers were dead

Six weeks in and I want to write down what happened while it's still clear.

I'd built a list of 340 candidate properties in two zip codes, sourced from a mix of code violation postings and my own driving. No owner phone numbers. So I bought skip tracing on all 340 at roughly 2.60 each, 890 total, which felt like the professional version of what I'd been doing by hand.

Got back numbers on 291 of the 340. Started calling. Of the 291, I reached a person who was the owner or lived with the owner on 47. Wrong number, disconnected, or no answer after four attempts on the rest. So 84% of what I paid for produced no contact.

Of the 47 real conversations, 6 said they'd consider selling. I passed those 6 to an investor who buys in one of those zips. He took 4, said no to 2 on location, and closed none of them so far.

Cost: 890 plus a 39 dialer month plus about 70 hours of calling. Return: nothing yet, possibly a fee later on one that's still talking.

Where I think it went wrong. The 84% number scared me into thinking I bought bad data, and I've since learned that hit rates like that aren't unusual for older records on a low turnover housing stock, which is exactly what I chose. The real problem is that I bought contact data before I had any evidence my 340 properties were worth contacting. Code violations plus tired paint got me a list of houses with problems, and a house with problems is not a person with a reason to sell. I paid 2.60 a head to find that out 340 times instead of 30 times.

What I'd do differently: buy 40, call 40, measure, then decide. And I'd have spent the 890 on figuring out my investor's buy box first, since he rejected 2 of my 6 on location and those were streets I could have ruled out on day one for free.

I don't regret the calling hours. The 47 conversations taught me more than the six weeks before them.