The same block driven three times, and the property that catches my eye is never the one I mailed
A case worth studying: a driver logs a boarded two-flat, mails it twice, no response. On the third pass, the property two doors down has a tarp on the roof, grass that has not been cut in six weeks, and a car in the driveway with a flat tire. Owner-occupied, not vacant. The two-flat was obvious enough that four other buyers mailed it first. The tarp house had no competition because it did not read as distressed from a list, only from the street. The two-flat sits. The tarp house goes under contract. The distress that a list can capture, a zip code vacancy rate or an absentee owner flag, is the distress everyone is already mailing. The distress that reads only in person, a fresh tarp, a dumpster that appeared last week and then stopped being used, a door that was painted and then left half-finished, is where the list thins out. I think drivers underweight how much the value of the method comes from timing and specificity rather than from the address itself. The address is just coordinates. What the address cannot carry is that you saw it on a Tuesday after a rainstorm and the water was still running down the front steps. So the question I keep turning over: when you log an address, are you also logging what you actually saw, or just the location, because those are two different assets and one of them expires?
