Cold calling a list that came straight from the county assessor is not the same as calling a worked list, and the results are not close

The 1.4 percent contact rate is the number most people won't say out loud, so credit for putting it there.

Where I'd push back is on the $0.08 to $0.18 range feeling expensive. That is the cheapest line item in the whole operation once you count caller hours. When my Scottsdale note went sideways in 2021 the borrower's county address was two transfers behind, and a $0.12 skip trace would have saved me six weeks of servicer runaround before I even got to the right phone number.

The propensity piece is where I'd actually spend the most time though. What is your current equity filter, if you have one?

The post makes a point worth unpacking for anyone who is new to list building, so I want to slow down on a couple of terms before getting to the substance.

A county assessor pull is a list of property owners taken straight from public tax records. It is cheap and often free or nearly free. Skip tracing is a separate step where a data vendor takes that raw owner record and finds current phone numbers, addresses, and sometimes email, by searching across databases that update more often than the county does. A disposition is simply how a call ended: answered and interested, answered and not interested, wrong number, no answer, and so on.

The core observation here is accurate. County records update slowly, and a phone number attached to a property owner's file in 2022 may belong to someone else entirely by now. If a caller is burning time on disconnected and recycled numbers, the cost per real conversation rises fast, even if the hourly rate looks reasonable on paper.

The skip trace cost the post cites, $0.08 to $0.18 per record, is in the range I see discussed in this space, though I would confirm current vendor pricing directly before budgeting a campaign around it. Pricing shifts with volume and vendor.

One thing the post touches on that beginners often miss: not every record on a list deserves equal effort. An owner who has held a property for 20 years and lives out of state is in a meaningfully different situation than someone who bought two years ago and lives next door. Prioritizing by those signals before dialing changes what the caller says and how they spend their time.

What does your current list look like in terms of how old it is and whether any skip tracing has been run on it?

The piece I would add is about trust transfers specifically: when a property moves into a living trust with no consideration exchanged, it often skips reassessment and generates zero new county record, so the name on your assessor pull is the grantor, the actual decision-maker is the trustee, and the phone number attached to either one may belong to neither. That gap does not show up in skip trace failure rates because the record looks valid, it just reaches the wrong person. How old is your current pull, and do you know whether your vendor flags trust vesting on the records before you dial?

The propensity point is where I would push further: equity position is not uniform information across a list, and the number that actually separates a productive segment from a wasted one is months of ownership, not years. A record showing 18 to 36 months sits in a window where the owner has absorbed transaction costs but has not yet built the inertia that makes a 22-year hold feel impossible to exit, and that cohort contacts and converts at a measurably different rate than the long-tenure absentee the post leads with.

What percentage of your current list falls into that mid-tenure band, and have you segmented dial priority around it at all?