Stopped trying to buy the neglected houses, started selling the owners a cleanup

Been riding along on driving routes with an investor friend since summer, mostly to work out where I fit. He wants contracts. I kept noticing that most of the addresses he throws away are people who need a yard cleared and a window boarded and have no intention of selling anything.

So I took the discards. 180 addresses he'd logged and written off over about five weeks. Mailed 40 of them, chosen by how bad the yard was, with a one page letter that priced a cleanup flat: haul and cut for $350, board a single ground floor opening for $180, tarp nothing because I'm not getting on a roof and I said so in the letter.

6 jobs. Five cleanups, one cleanup plus two boarded windows. $2,410 collected. My costs were a rented trailer twice at $60 a day, dump fees $215, plywood and screws about $90, and a guy I paid $22 an hour for 19 hours. Netted a bit over $1,500 on 40 letters and a lot of Saturdays.

The part that nearly broke it: two of the six were rentals and the person who answered my letter was a tenant who had no authority to hire anybody. I did one of those jobs before I understood that and had to chase the owner for payment for three weeks. Now I ask on the phone whether they're on the deed before I quote, and if the answer is fuzzy I ask for the owner's number.

What I'd keep: flat prices in the letter. Every one of the six said some version of "I called three people and nobody would give me a number." And I keep sending the addresses back to my friend with a note on what I saw inside the fence, which is worth more to him than the address ever was. Two of the six mentioned a relative who owns something they want gone.