What is the decay curve on a logged address when you re-drive the same routes?

Anyone re driving overlapping routes learns that a mowed yard does not mean anything changed. The grass gets cut while the mail keeps piling up, the fascia still peels and the same owner sits on the record. Code enforcement leans on somebody and the visible signal disappears for a month. If your app scores off photos it will mark that address cured, and it is not.

On the management side the number worth watching is how long the vacancy has run rather than how rough it looks. A unit empty 30 days is a turn. A unit empty past 90 with no lockbox and no sign belongs to someone who has stopped trying. If your logging captures a date and you re-drive, the second sighting is worth more than the first because it converts a snapshot into a duration.

One question on the holdout. Do both groups have to get the exact same mail piece for the comparison to mean anything? The instinct is to send a different letter on the second pass, since those addresses have already seen five, so it is worth being clear about whether that breaks the test.

Before the decay question I'd want to see the spend. 4,200 addresses times five touches is 21,000 pieces. At 60 cents a piece all in that's around $12,600, plus skip tracing. If the six-month cohort is half of that volume at half the response, you're paying full mail cost for a cohort that may be structurally worse. Have you costed the two cohorts separately or just the blended number?

Boarded window comes off, new plywood painted, that's a $200 job somebody did to stop a citation. Roof still shot. I'd weight the expensive deferred items way heavier than the cosmetic ones in your scoring, because the cosmetic stuff is exactly what decays in six months and the roof doesn't.

Slightly sideways question. If a driven list has a measurable half life, is there a real market for buying one? A lead pipeline that decays on a known curve and carries no exclusivity is worth close to nothing as a balance sheet asset when an operator tries to raise money against it.

Vacant land basically does not decay. A weeded lot looks the same in three years. What moves is the tax status, and in most counties delinquency is public and dated, so the tax roll is a far better clock than the date of the drive. Doesn't help ledger with houses, but if any of those 4,200 are lots, re-driving them is wasted postage.

I re-drive on 90 days and I won't pretend I've tested it. It's just that anything older than that I've stopped trusting my own notes on.

The selection point rena-expert made is the one I'd chase first, because it's free to check. Sort your 4,200 by your own distress score at time of logging and see whether the early cohort scores higher. If your average score has been sliding month over month, the age gap in response is mostly you running out of easy streets, and re-driving those same streets won't put the easy ones back.

Past a certain list size I think expansion wins regardless of what the holdout says. Six zips is a small footprint for 4,200 records, which means you're already mailing a meaningful share of the distressed stock in that footprint. Re-driving raises your touch density on the same owners. Adding a seventh zip gets you owners who've never heard from anybody. The decay question matters, but saturation might be the thing actually capping you.

I have zero addresses logged and this has made me less clear rather than more. If the first routes you drive are the best ones and everything after is marginal, then the response rate a new person sees in month one is the best it'll ever look? That seems worth knowing before I build a budget off it.