The mail list may be beating my 60 mile driving loops

Your 12 useful observations aren't equal and lumping them is hiding the answer. The chained gate one is worth more than the other 11 combined, because access failure is the difference between a parcel worth $4,000 an acre and one worth almost nothing until someone buys an easement. You found that for $86 and 11 hours.

How many of the 214 do you think have access problems? If it's 15%, that's 32 parcels where the mail response tells you nothing and the drive tells you everything, and you'd rather find it before you're under contract than during a title search. Price the drive against what a bad acquisition costs you, not against postage.

11 hours over four Saturdays is 2.75 hours a Saturday for 12 things you learned. If you paid someone $22 an hour to do that loop you'd call it $242 plus gas for 12 data points and you probably wouldn't blink. You're only calling it a hobby because it's your own time and it feels like driving.

The 35 that taught you nothing, did they teach you nothing or did they tell you there's nothing visible to find? Those feel different to me. If you'd driven past and seen a septic tank sticking out of the ground you'd count it as a win, so seeing that there isn't one is an answer too.

@wren, on land the null result really is close to nothing, because everything that matters is recorded somewhere. Zoning district, wetland mapping, whether there's a recorded easement across the neighbor's drive. Orchard's chained gate is a good example of the exception, since a recorded easement can exist behind a physical gate and a physical opening can exist with no legal right of access at all. Those two disagree more often than people expect.

Which is my actual argument for driving. Not to find distress. To find where the record and the ground disagree, and then go read the record again.

@parcel just moved the whole thread. If the drive is a record-verification tool then it belongs after you have a live seller, because that's when the record matters. Before that you're verifying records on 200 parcels you'll never buy.

I've been running something similar and my split is 3 to 1 toward mail. Two touches to everyone, then I only drive the ones who reply or the ones whose letter comes back undeliverable, because undeliverable on a tax delinquent parcel is its own signal and I want eyes on those.

My hit rate on that second group is better than anything I found by driving cold. Small sample, maybe 40 letters.

Naive question. If they're three years behind on taxes, isn't there a clock running? I don't understand how much time you actually have with these owners before the county does something and whether that changes whether you drive or mail first.

The abandoned mobile homes are worth a second look for a reason nobody's said. Removing one costs real money and it's a line item most land buyers forget, so a parcel with a dead single wide on it is cheaper for a reason and you can price that reason. I've hauled enough of that stuff to know it isn't free and it isn't quick.

On @vellum's question, the timeline for tax delinquency and what the county can do with the parcel varies state to state, and in some places the process is a tax lien sale and in others it's a deed sale with a redemption window. Orchard's local statute controls it and the treasurer's office can tell him. That timeline should drive his mail sequencing, since an owner two months from losing the parcel behaves differently than one who's just annoyed.

Before Saturday five, what's your buy box? You've described 214 parcels and no criteria for what you'd actually pay for one. I ask because I did the same thing for eight months on a different asset type and the driving felt productive while I had no idea what I was looking for.

If the answer is anything under $1,500 an acre with road frontage, that cuts 214 down to something you can drive properly in two Saturdays.

$86 of gas for four Saturdays sounds low for 240 miles of loops plus 90 minutes each way. Are you counting the drive out or only the loop?

Genuinely asking, what do you end up doing with a wooded 20 acres you buy at a discount? I follow the sourcing part and I lose the part where it turns into anything.

The value in showing up isn't the parcel, it's the guy on the tractor two properties over. In a county that doesn't publish prices he's your comp set and he knows which parcels have water and which flood. You can't mail merge that.

So I'd keep the loops and stop pretending they're a lead source. They're market research and you should measure them that way.

@girder's framing is the one that helps me. I've been driving houses and treating every hour as lead generation and getting discouraged by the count. Half of what I actually got was learning which streets are which.

Coming back to disagree with my earlier post a bit. @anchor's question makes the $242 look worse, because paying someone $22 an hour to observe parcels you have no criteria for is money spent to feel busy. Get the buy box down first, then the same 11 hours is worth double.

A house shows you its problems and land hides them in the record. That's a distinction I hadn't understood before and it makes the whole driving idea make more sense to me as a house thing than a land thing.