Driving a tight repeat route versus covering new ground every time

Repeat, and my reason has nothing to do with leads. If you drive the same 40 blocks for six months you will know what things sell for and how long they sit, and that is the input you actually need before you write an offer on anything. New ground gives you addresses you can't price.

The change signal is real, and the people managing property see it constantly. A house goes bad in a specific order. Landscaping first, then the gutters, then something on the roof, then the mail stops getting picked up. One frame won't tell you whether you're looking at a house on the way down or a house that has looked like that since 2011. So repeat. But 40 blocks is too small. Call it 150 to 200 doors of the right kind of stock, driven monthly.

Half and half, because it is the allocation that still works if either theory turns out to be wrong. Being roughly right on both beats being perfectly committed to the one that turns out to be the story people tell themselves.

Land is different enough that I almost didn't vote. Vacant parcels don't develop a tarp. What changes on a parcel is a survey stake, a new gate, a mowing pattern that stops, or a for sale sign that goes up handwritten. Those changes are slower than a roof and they still only show up on a second pass, so I'm repeat, just at a much longer interval. Quarterly.

In a thin rural market the repeat route is not really a choice, it is geography. Take a buyer with maybe 900 houses inside a reasonable drive. They have seen all of them, so they are repeat by default. The tradeoff nobody mentions is that in a small market you get recognized, and being the person who drives past the same houses slowly every Saturday carries a social cost. The operators who last there learn to wave.

@laurenkim53 that last line is the most practical thing in this thread.

To @nicole_adeyemi's actual question, the comparison usually looks like this. A year of new ground, roughly 1,400 addresses logged, produces deals out of about 11 of them. A move to a repeat route of about 250 doors produces three deals in nine months. The confound worth flagging is that year one is also the year an operator does not yet know what they are looking at and the letters are bad. Some of that improvement belongs to the operator rather than the route.

The repeat route also builds something you can sell, which is what I keep noticing from the service side. If you know 200 doors that well, an investor who doesn't live there wants your eyes. That's a different business from buying houses and it seems easier to start.

Repeat route, with one caution on the change-over-time approach: whatever gets recorded about occupied houses over months should stay to what's visible from a public road and stay about the property. Photographing the same house repeatedly and building a file on the people inside it is a different activity, and the rules on outreach and on what can be done with collected data vary by state and are getting tighter. Worth one conversation with a local attorney before that file reaches 200 entries.

@dmitri_248 that hadn't occurred to me and I'm studying for a license right now, so thank you. The disclosure side of it worries me more than the photos.

A split by season works well. Repeat routes in spring and summer, when yards actually tell you something, and new ground in winter, when every lawn in the state looks dead and the only signals left are boards, tarps, and roofs.

Repeat routes fit into a work day and new ground doesn't. Driving 40 minutes out before logging a single address tends to get done four times, then stop. The route that gets driven is the route on the way to something else.

Nobody prices this carefully enough. New ground costs more per address logged, because the miles between logged properties are higher and the stock is unknown, so a bigger share of what gets logged ends up unusable. Repeat routes cost almost nothing per pass and yield fewer new addresses per pass. So the real question is whether one changed house is worth more than twenty new ones. In practice a changed house tends to convert at maybe five to eight times the rate of a cold address, and twenty is more than eight, so volume wins on raw math. What breaks the math is that mail volume has a cost ceiling, and once that ceiling is hit, conversion rate is the only thing left. Repeat wins at small budgets. Volume wins if the budget covers mailing everything logged.

@dpatel_re That's the clearest framing here. Small budget, repeat route. Money for mail, go for volume. Which means most of the disagreement on this actually comes down to differences in budget, not strategy.

Voted repeat and I haven't driven anything yet, so discount that. What sold me was @tonyv88 describing the order things fall apart in. I'm about to have one rental and I'd rather learn to read that on 200 houses I see every month than on 2,000 I see once.