Paid $410 for a skip traced list, 600 dials, one maybe

Trying to work out what my first deal actually costs, and I figured the cheapest way to find sellers was to call them myself. So here's what that came to.

List: 2,400 absentee owners in two zip codes, single family, no other filter. $410 skip traced. Dialer: $99 a month, I used it for two months, so $198. Total $608 plus my time.

Over three weeks I made about 600 dials in roughly 14 hours. Of those, 31 percent were wrong numbers or disconnected. I reached a live person 43 times. Of those 43, nine would talk to me past the first sentence. One said call me in the spring. Nobody else was close.

The part I got wrong isn't the effort, it's that I picked "absentee owner" as my only filter because it was the only word I understood at the time. Absentee just means the mailing address is different from the property address. It doesn't mean anything is wrong in that owner's life. I was calling 2,400 people who mostly had no reason to sell, and I was calling them badly, because I had no script and I was reading off a spreadsheet.

The thing that actually stopped me was that I couldn't tell whether 600 dials was a real test or a rounding error. I still don't know. I'd guess it's a rounding error.

What I'd do differently: much smaller list with a reason attached to it, some kind of distress or life event layered on top of absentee, and I'd write the first thirty seconds down and say it the same way 200 times before I judged anything. Also I'd have checked do-not-call obligations before I dialed the first number instead of after the hundredth, which is a conversation for someone licensed and not for me.

4 replies

1brandonlee36Passive

600 dials in 14 hours is about 43 an hour, which for manual dialing off a spreadsheet is roughly what I'd expect and also why the test told you nothing. A caller on a decent dialer does several times that. You didn't run an experiment, you ran a very small sample of a slow process. That's not a criticism of quitting, it's a reason not to conclude anything from it.

1gregpowell66AG4BPRO8

@thicket is right on the volume and I'd push further. Three weeks is nothing. The one who said call me in the spring is the only honest data point in the whole exercise, and you'd have to still be around in the spring for it to be worth $608. Most of what outbound produces is a follow-up list, and you closed the file before the follow-up list matured. My first two years in construction estimating worked the same way, the bids I lost in March came back in September if I stayed in touch.

2dpatel_reCS4A

The list criteria is the whole loss and everything else is downstream. Absentee alone in two zip codes gives you a population whose base rate of wanting to sell this quarter is maybe one or two percent, and most of those are already listed. Layer something that indicates a decision has been forced, tax delinquency, code violations, an inherited transfer on the deed, and your conversation-to-lead rate moves before you improve a single thing about your calling. Availability of those records varies by county and some states are much more open than others, so check what your county actually publishes before you budget for it. Your $410 bought volume when you needed selection.

Paid $410 for a skip traced list, 600 dials, one maybe

4 replies