Calling versus texting first with a large owner list and one person to work it

The thing that pushed me toward texts as a first touch when I was mapping this out is that a text lets a seller respond on their own schedule. An owner of a 6 unit who works days isn't answering a number they don't know at 6pm. They might read a text at 10pm and answer in the morning.

Where I get stuck is the same place you are, cairn. The registration side of texting is real work and doing it wrong means your messages stop landing without anyone telling you. Calling has rules too, but at least you know when a call didn't connect.

Most operators land on calls, not texts, and the reason is boring. Reply rates on text look great until the replies get sorted. A big share are people asking to be removed, and those aren't neutral, they're a suppression obligation and sometimes worse. At 4,000 records with one person, calls are the safer default, though texts do work. One person can't afford a channel where a mistake propagates to hundreds of records before it's noticed. A bad call script hurts one conversation. A bad text blast hurts the whole number pool.

Cobalt's point about propagation is the one worth underlining. In property management, the closest analog is mass tenant notices, and the difference between a phone call going badly and a mass message going badly is about two orders of magnitude of cleanup. On the actual question, cairn, 4,000 records is small enough to work thoroughly by phone over a few months. At 40,000 the throughput argument would win. At 4,000 the case for volume tooling is weaker than it looks.

The right answer to this changes with scale. It used to be calls. Now it's both, because the two channels do different jobs. Text finds the people who will engage at all. Calls close the ones who engaged into an actual appointment. Running both channels well typically takes staff, though. Cairn, with just one person, running both means two learning curves at once, and both will go badly. Pick calls, get to 600 or 800 dials, and see what the actual contact rate is. That number is what shows whether the list is any good, and text replies won't give it, because they filter out everybody who reads and ignores. One more thing. Long-tenured owners of small multifamily skew older on average and answer the phone more than the general population. That's the one place where calling still has a measurable edge.

Thatch's point about older owners answering more is the one that would move the calculus. On a single family list, the safer assumption is that fewer people pick up, which argues for building the funnel around text. On a list weighted toward 4 to 12 unit owners, dialing tends to make more sense.

Reading this thread, what strikes me is that the poll options aren't really about channels, they're about how much compliance surface you're willing to own. Calls put the exposure in one conversation at a time. Texts put it in a system you configured once and then trusted.

Cairn, if you go the hire-a-service route eventually, the calling months you do yourself aren't wasted. You'll know what a real objection sounds like and you'll be able to tell whether a vendor's callers are actually having conversations or just reading a script at people.