Calls or texts first when you have 4,000 records and one person

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 of our clients get calls, not texts, and the reason is boring. Reply rates on text look great until you sort the replies. A big share are people telling you to lose their number, and those are not neutral, they're a suppression obligation and sometimes worse.

Cairn, at 4,000 records with one person, I'd say calls, though texts do work. It's that you personally cannot afford a channel where a mistake propagates to hundreds of people before you notice. A bad call script hurts one conversation. A bad text blast hurts your whole number pool.

Cobalt's point about propagation is the one I'd underline. Managing property, the closest thing I deal with 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 your actual question, cairn, 4,000 records is small enough that you can work it thoroughly by phone over a few months. If you had 40,000 the throughput argument would win. At 4,000 the argument for volume tooling is weaker than it looks.

My answer to this has changed over time. It used to be calls. Now it's both, because the two channels do different jobs. Text finds you the people who will engage at all. Calls close the ones who engaged into an actual appointment.

But that's with staff. Cairn, with just you, running both means you're doing two learning curves at once and you'll do both badly. Pick calls, get to 600 or 800 dials, and see what your actual contact rate is. That number is what tells you whether the list is any good, and you can't get it from text replies because text replies 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 an edge you can measure.

Thatch's point about older owners answering more is the one thing that would move me. My list is single family and I assume nobody picks up, so I've been building around text. If I were on 4 to 12 unit owners I'd probably dial.

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.