Twenty two addresses from one Saturday. Now what?

I finally stopped reading and drove. Three hours Saturday morning, one older neighborhood on the edge of town where the houses are 1950s ranches and about a third of them have been added onto badly.

What I have: 22 addresses in a notes app. 6 with tarps or visible roof damage, 11 with yards nobody has touched in months, 3 with mail visibly stacked in the box, 2 boarded. I took photos of every one from the street.

What I did next: I put 9 of them into the county assessor site and got owner names. 4 of those had a mailing address different from the property address, which I understand is a decent sign the owner doesn't live there.

Where I'm stuck. I have maybe $150 I'm willing to spend on this before I'd feel silly. Options as I see them: hand write letters to the 9 I have names for, or pay for one of the driving apps that pulls the owner data and mails for me, or knock on the two boarded ones since they're clearly vacant and I'd only be talking to neighbors anyway.

Also, 22 addresses in three hours feels slow to me. Was I driving too carefully or is that just what it is on the first try?

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1luis_carrera Get yours

22 in three hours is fine. The number that matters is how many of those you actually contact more than once, and right now it's zero for all of them.

I'd skip the app for now. $150 buys you stamps and envelopes for 9 letters four times over, and mailing the same 9 people four times over three months will teach you more than 200 fresh addresses will. The apps get useful when your bottleneck is data entry, and yours isn't.

One thing I'd change about your list. Overgrown yards in a neighborhood where a third of the houses look tired is weak signal, because tired is the baseline there. The tarps and the boarded ones are real. Mail piling up is real. I'd sort your 22 into a top tier of maybe 8 and stop pretending the rest are leads yet.

And re-drive the same streets in six weeks. The house that had a tarp in March and still has it in May is telling you something the assessor site never will. I keep a date next to every address for exactly that reason, and I only started doing that after losing track of which street I'd already done twice.

Twenty two addresses from one Saturday. Now what?

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