A driving for dollars case study: 612 addresses, three mail touches, zero contracts, and where the campaign actually broke
Take a four month driving for dollars campaign: 612 addresses logged, 380 with a usable mailing address, three mail touches to those 380 over about ten weeks. Printing and postage might run around 700 dollars, skip trace and list cleanup another couple hundred, plus gas and dozens of hours of drive time. A plausible result: 14 calls, 3 in-person appointments, 0 contracts, with the appointments that did happen wanting retail value or already under contract with an agent. The failure point in a campaign like this is usually the logging step, not the mail. Driving neighborhoods that are already gentrifying and logging cosmetic issues, peeling paint on a house with a long-tenured, high-equity owner, produces a list that looks like distress but isn't motivation. A useful discipline is defining log criteria before the car ever moves and refusing to log anything short of real signal: a tarp, a boarded opening, roofline sag, mail piling up, a notice taped to the door. Dead grass alone doesn't qualify. A second, smaller but expensive problem is undeliverable mail, commonly running 20 percent or more of the list across multiple touches, since postage was paid on addresses that were never going to arrive. Running mailing addresses through a cleanup pass before the first touch, rather than discovering the bounce rate at the third touch, is a straightforward fix that saves real money on a campaign like this.
