Do you drive the same streets over and over or 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.

Managing properties, I see the change signal all the time and it's real. 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. If you only see one frame you can't tell 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. I'd want 150 to 200 doors of the right kind of stock, driven monthly.

Half and half, because it's the answer that keeps working if either theory is wrong. I'd rather be roughly right on both than 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.

Out where I look the repeat route isn't a choice, it's geography. There are maybe 900 houses within a reasonable drive and I've seen all of them. So I'm repeat, by default. The tradeoff nobody mentions is that in a small market you get recognized, and being the guy who drives past the same houses slowly every Saturday has a social cost. I now wave.

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

Switched, so I'll answer @parcel's actual question. Did new ground for a year, roughly 1,400 addresses logged, and my deals came from 11 of them. Went to a repeat route last spring, about 250 doors, and I've done three deals off it in nine months.

But there's a confound worth flagging. In year one I didn't know what I was looking at and my letters were bad. Some of the improvement is me, not 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.

Voted repeat. One caution on the change-over-time approach: whatever you're recording about occupied houses over months, keep it to what's visible from a public road and keep it 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 you can do with collected data vary by state and are getting tighter. Worth one conversation with a local attorney before you have 200 files.

@warrant 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.

Half and half but with the split done by season. Repeat route in spring and summer when yards tell you something. 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. If you're driving 40 minutes out before you log a single address, you'll do it four times and stop. The route you drive is the route on the way to something else.

Nobody has priced this. New ground costs more per address logged, because the miles between logged properties are higher and you don't know the stock, so a bigger share of what you log is unusable. Repeat costs almost nothing per pass and yields fewer new addresses per pass.

So the question is really whether one changed house is worth more than twenty new ones. In my numbers a changed house converts 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 you can only mail so many addresses before the cost of the mail matters, and then the conversion rate is the only thing left. Repeat wins at small budgets. Volume wins if you can pay to mail everything you log.

@sextant that's the clearest framing here. Small budget, repeat. Money for mail, volume. Which means most of the people arguing about this are actually arguing about their bank balance.

Voted repeat and I haven't driven anything yet, so discount that. What sold me was @trellis 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.