What to do with a list of addresses from a first driving for dollars session

Take a first driving for dollars outing, three hours on a Saturday morning in one older neighborhood of 1950s ranches, yielding 22 addresses in a notes app. Say 6 show tarps or visible roof damage, 11 have yards untouched for months, 3 have mail visibly stacked, and 2 are boarded, all photographed from the street. Running a subset, say 9 of those addresses, through the county assessor site to get owner names is the right next step, and finding that several of them have a mailing address different from the property address is a reasonable signal the owner does not live there. With a modest budget, hand-written letters to the addresses with known owner names tend to outperform a paid driving app's mail service on response rate, since personalization matters more in this channel than volume. The two boarded properties are worth a door knock since they are clearly vacant and any conversation is with a neighbor rather than the owner, which can still surface useful information. Twenty two addresses in three hours on a first pass is not slow. Most people speed up significantly after the first few sessions once they know what to look for and stop second-guessing borderline cases.

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luis_carrera CS1CPRO 12

22 in three hours is fine. The number that matters is how many of those get contacted more than once, and right now that's zero for all of them. Skip the app for now. $150 buys stamps and envelopes for 9 letters four times over, and mailing the same 9 people four times over three months teaches more than 200 fresh addresses will. Apps get useful once the bottleneck is data entry, and that isn't the bottleneck yet. One thing worth reconsidering on the list. Overgrown yards in a neighborhood where a third of the houses look tired is weak signal, because tired is the baseline there. Tarps and boarded houses are real signal. Mail piling up is real signal. Sorting the 22 into a top tier of maybe 8 is more honest than treating the rest as leads yet. Re-drive the same streets in six weeks. A house with a tarp in March that still has one in May is telling you something the assessor site never will. Keeping a date next to every address exists for exactly that reason, usually learned the hard way after losing track of which street had already been covered twice.

luis_carrera CS1CPRO 12

What to do with a list of addresses from a first driving for dollars session

1 reply