My whole operation is eleven addresses written on a receipt

Go talk to the flipper. It's a free conversation and you're stuck anyway.

Buyer first, always. $79 a month is small, but the habit of paying for tools before you have demand is the expensive part, and it doesn't get cheaper as you scale.

Eight of eleven with the mailing address equal to the property address doesn't mean the mail goes nowhere, it usually just means nobody ever filed a change with the assessor. Owners live in their houses. Absentee is when the mailing address is somewhere else, and that's the flag people actually chase.

You can send a letter for the price of a stamp to all eleven right now. Handwritten, short, says you noticed the house and asks if they've thought about selling. No subscription needed. If two write back you've learned more than $79 of data would have told you.

The code enforcement notice is the one I'd chase first. That's a deadline with a cost attached, and the owner already knows they have a problem. The tarp is second because a tarp means water has been getting in for a while. Waist-high grass by itself is just somebody on vacation half the time.

@cairn's correction matters and it's the thing that took me longest to learn. My list is 300 addresses and the only ones that ever go anywhere are the ones where the mailing address is out of county. Compass, sort your eleven that way before you spend a dollar.

When you talk to the flipper, ask him straight what he pays for a lead and what has to be true for him to pay it. Half the people I asked that question said something useful and the other half said they'd figure it out later, which told me they weren't buying much.

Skip tracing on eleven records isn't a $79 monthly problem, most services sell single lookups for a couple of dollars. You're comparing a subscription to nothing when there's a middle option. But do the letters and the conversation with the flipper first, they're both cheaper than either.