612 addresses, three mail touches, zero contracts. The list was the problem.

Four months, and I'm writing this down while the receipts are still in front of me.

Drove 612 addresses into the app between October and February. 380 came back with a mailing address I was willing to use. Three touches to those 380 over about ten weeks. Printing and postage through the app ran roughly $700. Skip trace and list cleanup another $190. Gas $260, and I put 46 hours of drive time in a spreadsheet because I wanted to know.

Result: 14 calls, 3 appointments where I actually stood in a kitchen, 0 contracts. Two of the three wanted retail and one had already listed with an agent the week before my second letter.

Where it went wrong: the logging step, not the mail. I drove the neighborhoods I like. Two of them are the zips everybody is renovating, and the "distress" I was logging was cosmetic. Peeling paint on a house whose owner has been there 14 years and has enormous equity is not a motivated seller, it's somebody who hasn't painted. When I went back through my photos afterward, 71 of the 612 had anything I'd now call structural or vacancy signal. I mailed the other 541 the same letter.

Second problem, smaller but expensive: 84 of the 380 came back undeliverable across the three touches. 22 percent. I paid for three touches on a chunk of addresses that were never going to arrive anywhere.

What I'd do differently: define the log criteria before the car moves and refuse to log anything that doesn't hit at least one of them. Tarp, boarded opening, roofline sag, mail piled on the porch, notice taped to the door. Dead grass on its own doesn't earn a stamp. And run the mailing addresses through a cleanup pass before touch one instead of finding out at touch three.

4 replies

1wendy_park48CapitalPRO7

I'd put the cause somewhere else, @bramble. 22 percent undeliverable is not a small second problem, it's the whole hole in the bucket. You paid for 1,140 pieces of mail and a fifth of them went nowhere, and worse, you don't know whether the ones that bounced were your best addresses. Vacant houses with an owner nobody can find are exactly the file you want, and they're also exactly the file that bounces.

The fix isn't only a cleanup pass. When mail bounces on a property that looks vacant from the street, that's a signal to spend on a deeper search rather than to drop the record. On the ones that mattered I've gone to the recorded deed and read the mailing address on the instrument itself, plus whoever the tax bill is going to where the county publishes that, which some don't.

On the cosmetic versus structural point I half agree. Peeling paint alone is weak. Peeling paint on a house owned by an entity registered out of state is not weak. Your filter should sit on the ownership record as much as on the siding, and you can't see the ownership from the car.

1jessreyes12AU1APRO8

Asking the thing I'd have kept my mouth shut about: from the street, how do you actually tell structural from cosmetic? I can see a tarp. I don't know what a sagging roofline looks like versus a house that was framed cheap in 1962, and I don't want to log 500 addresses and find out in February that I was wrong the whole time.

2kevin_lombardPG1BPRO5

Something in the timeline bothers me. October to February is four months, and two of those months are the ones where nobody in your market is thinking about selling and everybody's lawn is dead so the cosmetic signal you were logging means nothing at all. Three of your touches landed in that window.

I'm not saying the list was fine. @fathom's bounce point seems like real money. But I'd want to see the same 380 addresses mailed in April before I concluded the neighborhoods were wrong.

612 addresses, three mail touches, zero contracts. The list was the problem.

4 replies