Is scouting actually the cheapest way in, or just the cheapest way to be busy

The distinction is what each one gets you access to. Paper analysis you can do alone forever and nobody will ever know you did it. Scouting puts you in conversation with buyers, and those conversations are the thing you cannot generate at a desk. I built a service business around this field and every piece of it came from someone I'd already done something small for. The underwriting gap you named is real, though, so I'd do both and treat the driving as the part that produces relationships rather than the part that produces skill.

Land is where this shows up hardest. Spotting a vacant parcel is trivial and worth nothing. Knowing whether it can be split, what the setbacks do to a buildable envelope and whether utilities are within reach is the entire value, and no amount of driving teaches that. So for my corner of the field, scouting alone would be busywork. For houses it's different, since condition really is visible from the curb and condition really does move the number.

The two skills separate cleanly. Scouting teaches deal recognition, meaning the ability to look at a property and an owner situation and judge whether an investor would want it. Underwriting teaches what to pay. They're learned in different places and they don't substitute for each other.

What bird dogging gives you that desk study doesn't is a working relationship with someone who closes. When you hand over a lead and the investor says no, the reason he gives is free training in his buy box, and that reason is the piece beginners cannot get from books. Ask for it every time. A scout who collects fifty rejection reasons has a better picture of a local market than someone who has run fifty spreadsheets alone.

On cost, treat scouting as a real budget line rather than free. Gas, time, and any data subscription are the spend, and the counting unit that matters is conversations with owners per dollar, not addresses gathered. Foreclosure filings have been rising year over year for more than a year running per ATTOM, so the supply of findable distressed inventory is favorable right now, and so is competition from investors running the same data themselves.

One limit to hold onto: the role is passing information. Negotiating terms or marketing a property on an owner's behalf can cross into activity that requires a license, and where that line falls is set by each state and has been tightening in several. Get your state's version confirmed by a licensed professional before you take on anything beyond handing over what you observed.