Paid per address for six weeks. 470 were already in the client's CRM.

Six weeks of paying someone per address and the invoice math came out worse than if I had done nothing at all.

Setup. I hold a small portfolio and started running leads on the side for two investor clients, both buying 1970s small multifamily and tired single family in my metro. I hired a part-timer at $3 per delivered address, each one with a photo and a two line condition note. Over six weeks she brought me 1,180 addresses. That is $3,540 in driver pay, plus $190 for a skip trace batch on the 300 that looked worst.

Client A's acquisitions manager ran my list against their CRM and came back with 470 already in their system, a chunk of them from mailers they had sent twice. Another 260 got dropped for being outside their box on unit count or year built. Of what was left they pursued 14 and closed 1. My fee on that close was $2,000.

$3,730 out, $2,000 in, six weeks of my evenings managing a route.

What went wrong, in order. I paid on delivery instead of on acceptance, so a duplicate cost me exactly what a live lead cost me. I never asked either client for a suppression file, and when I finally did, both had one sitting there and sent it in an hour. Third, I wrote the driver's criteria around visible distress instead of the client's actual buy box, so she shot every house with tall grass regardless of size or vintage.

What I would do differently. Get the suppression file before day one and load it on the driver's phone. Pay a higher rate per accepted address and nothing for a rejected one, with the client sending accept or reject inside 72 hours so the driver still gets paid on a normal cycle.

4 replies

2laurenkim53Passive

The duplicate rate is the part that scales badly out here too. In my counties there are maybe four active buyers and they have all mailed the same 900 vacant parcels for years, so anything I find by driving has been touched. The only addresses nobody had were ones where the owner died out of state and the heirs never recorded anything locally. Those took records work, not windshield time.

1wendy_park48CapitalPRO7

Read your own arrangement back and the driver contract was the expensive document, not the client agreement. Pay on delivery means you took the entire quality risk and passed none of it downstream, which is fine only if you already know your accept rate. You did not, because it was week one.

Two things I would put in writing next time. A suppression clause where the client warrants they will send a current exclusion list monthly and that anything on it is not billable, plus a definition of accepted that is objective enough to argue about. Accepted meaning the address matches the criteria sheet is very different from accepted meaning the manager liked it. The second version lets a client reject on mood and you will never win that conversation.

Also worth pinning down who owns the address list when the engagement ends. If you built 1,180 records and the client's CRM now holds all of them, you handed over your only asset for $2,000.

1paulgrant17PassivePRO5

Dumb question, does asking a client for their existing lead list make you look green or make you look organized?

1nicole_adeyemiPassivePRO5

I do not think the suppression file was the real cause, thicket. Even with the 470 removed you still had 260 rejected on buy box, and the ones that survived converted at 1 in 14 anyway. The criteria sheet was the broken step. Tall grass tells you a property is neglected and tells you nothing about whether an owner is ready to sell, and a driver paid per address has every reason to shoot the marginal one. Fix the definition of a lead first and the duplicate problem shrinks on its own, because narrow criteria produce fewer addresses that everyone has already mailed.

Paid per address for six weeks. 470 were already in the client's CRM.

4 replies