Most of my 26 leads were already in somebody's software. Four months, $300.

I was doing this to build the down payment for the first rental, and I wanted the practice of looking at houses without the risk of owning one. It didn't work, and the reason is specific enough to be worth writing down.

What I spent: $89 a month for four months on a list and skip trace product, $312 on 300 mailers at two separate drops, and about $140 of gas. Call it $1,140. What I made: one $300 fee on a lead that turned into a small assignment for an investor who bought lists from the same vendor I did.

The failure step wasn't sourcing, and it wasn't the calls. I sent 26 leads to three investors over four months. 22 came back as "already have it," and in most cases they could show me a date earlier than mine. I was pulling tax delinquent and pre foreclosure records from a national vendor with a monthly subscription, filtering by the same obvious criteria any buyer in my county would filter by, in a county with maybe fifteen active buyers who all subscribe to something similar. I was manufacturing duplicates at $89 a month and mailing them.

The one that paid was the only lead that didn't come from the list. It came from a woman at a church rummage sale who mentioned her brother's house had a tarp on it since the spring.

Two other things I got wrong that cost less but stung. I never asked any of the three what they already had in their pipeline, so I had no exclusion list and no way to check before spending a stamp. And I priced the whole thing as though a fee per lead sent existed. It doesn't. The fee exists per closing, and 26 sent leads with a 4 percent hit rate against buyers who already knew the addresses was never going to produce four closings.

What I'd do differently: drop the national list entirely and spend the same $89 on nothing. Work the two channels software can't reach, which are people who talk to me in person and the trades who see the inside of houses. Before sending anything, ask each investor for a list of addresses they're already working so a duplicate costs me a text instead of a stamp. And confirm the fee trigger and amount in an email before the first lead goes out, which I never did with any of the three, so the $300 was a number the investor chose after the fact.

I'm not calling the strategy broken. I ran the version of it that competes head on with the tools my buyers already own, and that version loses.