One lead type across a whole county, or every lead type in a six block area

Question

For anyone bird dogging with limited hours a week, the two ways of working produce very different results. Option one is picking a single situation type and covering a whole county with it. Say probate filings, tax delinquent parcels, or code violations. This means learning one record source deeply, recognizing a filing before the mail even goes out, and being able to tell an investor exactly what kind of seller they're about to talk to. The weakness is that any other scout in the county can pull the same filings, and once one person automates the pull, everyone ends up mailing the same list. Option two is picking a small area, six or eight blocks, and knowing everything happening in it. Who died, who moved a dumpster in, which duplex has had a for rent sign up since last summer, which corner lot the city keeps mowing. That kind of hyper-local knowledge can't easily be copied. The weakness is that six blocks might produce only a couple of real opportunities a year, and an investor doesn't care how well an area is known if it can't reliably produce deals. A reasonable read is that a newer scout with limited capital often does better starting with the second approach, since the lack of competition compensates for lower volume, while someone who needs to feed a buyer consistently needs the first. Which one wins depends heavily on how much volume the buyer actually needs versus how much edge matters.

mikeoconnell7 · Accepted Answer

You're framing these as alternatives and they don't compete for the same five hours. Option one is a filter you set up once. If you pick one record source and one county, that's a couple of hours to figure out how to pull it and then maybe twenty minutes a week to read the new filings. It's not a five hour a week activity unless you're also mailing everybody on it, and mailing everybody on it is exactly the crowded version @diane_kowalski described. So run the filing check as a twenty minute weekly habit and spend the remaining four and a half hours on the six blocks. When a filing lands inside your blocks, you already know the house, the condition, and probably a neighbor who'll tell you what's happening. That combination is the thing another scout with the same subscription doesn't have. When a filing lands outside your blocks, do nothing with it unless it looks unusual, because it would be a cold address that four other people also got. The order matters for the investor conversation too. "Here's an address off a list" gets a maybe. "Here's an address off a list, and I've walked past it every week for a year, and here's what the roof looks like from the alley" gets a phone call. Same lead, different amount of work behind it, and the work is the part nobody can buy for $89 a month. Five hours is enough for both if the list gets treated as something to read rather than something to work.

monica_tran3 · Answer

The small area tends to win, and the reason has less to do with real estate than with how service businesses generate leads generally. Repeat exposure to the same people generates inbound. Becoming the person the whole block knows is interested in houses means a neighbor's daughter calls when her mother goes into care. A filing list can only be pushed against, never generates inbound on its own. Two real opportunities a year is a weak answer for income needed this quarter and a strong one for anyone playing longer than that, @nicole_adeyemi.

diane_kowalski · Answer

Depends what the record source is. Probate and code violations get pulled by everybody. Tax delinquency on vacant land is barely touched where I look, partly because most house buyers don't want it and partly because the parcels are annoying to identify. So option one isn't uniformly crowded, it's crowded in the categories that produce easy houses. Given that you already know parcels and zoning, I'd guess your version of option one is less contested than the generic version.

Rena Guide · Answer

A definition first, since two of them are doing a lot of work in this thread. A lead source is where you learn a property might be available. A record source is a public filing you can search, like a probate case index at the county courthouse or a tax delinquency list from the treasurer. What's in each and how you get at it varies by state and often by county, and some counties charge for the list while others post it online for free.

@nicole_adeyemi, the practical thing that decides this for a beginner is usually the investor, not the scout. Before you choose, ask the buyer your neighbor knows two questions. What does he already buy lists for, and how many leads a month does he actually want. If he already subscribes to a probate data product, sending him probate leads means competing with software he pays for. If he says he wants three good ones a month rather than thirty, the small area version can feed him.

One thing worth being careful about in both options. The scouting role means passing along information and getting a finder's fee from the investor. If you start negotiating price or terms for the seller, some states treat that as activity that needs a real estate license, and the trigger differs by state, so check yours with an attorney before your arrangement gets more involved than handing over an address and a phone number.

Five hours a week fits the small area better. Forty addresses is already a start on it.

raj_mehta14 · Answer

Something basic worth clarifying here. In the option of covering every lead type across a smaller area, what is actually being looked at while walking around. "Who died" only makes sense once there's a way to know that, whether from probate filings, obituaries, or some other public record trail.

tonyv88 · Answer

@rajmehta14, that tracks with why talking to people works. On the management side, word of a death or a move to assisted living tends to reach a property manager through a neighbor roughly a month before anything shows up in a filing, consistently. Which is also the answer for @nicoleadeyemi. The gap between when a situation exists and when it appears in a record is where the whole advantage lives. Records are the same information arriving late to everyone at once. The catch is that talking to sixty strangers a week is a real skill and some people will never do it, in which case option one is the honest choice.

sonia_alvarez · Answer

@mikeoconnell7's split is the stronger call, though the answer changes if the investor pays anything up front. If he doesn't, and almost none of them do, the only compensation event is his closing, and closings come from leads he can actually act on. Depth beats volume when payment is tied to outcome. Volume only wins when payment is per lead delivered.

priya_n21 · Answer

Two opportunities a year at a couple thousand each isn't income, it's a hobby that occasionally pays, and either path is realistically a second job. Between the two, the county wide filter is the stronger pick, because the failure is fast and cheap and it shows within about eight weeks whether anyone wants what's being sent.

dmitri_248 · Answer

Before either approach, get the fee arrangement in an email. Amount, what event triggers payment, how long the investor has to respond before the lead reverts. Handshake arrangements tend to produce the same argument at the same moment, which is when the investor closes on something he says he already had. Nothing about choosing a lead source fixes that, @nicole_adeyemi.

mitchell_ray4 · Answer

Trades angle on option two. I'm in six or eight houses a week and I see the inside, which no walk-around and no filing gives you. If you can get two contractors in your blocks to text you when they bid a job the owner can't afford, that's a third channel and it costs you coffee. Wouldn't have thought of it as a lead source until somebody here pointed out that a declined estimate is a motivated seller with a number attached.

tashaford30 · Answer

Consider a case where an investor picks a small area for something adjacent, say learning what a first purchase should cost, and eight months in knows that market better than any agent around. It hasn't produced a single lead for anyone. That's a common outcome with the small-area approach and it can still be worth doing, so weigh that against a wider net covering a single situation type across the whole county.

One lead type across a whole county, or every lead type in a six block area

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