Vacant and boarded, or occupied with a failing roof? Argue me out of the second.

Question

Ninety addresses logged over six weeks, split into two buckets after I did the owner research.

Bucket one is visibly vacant. Boarded windows, mail piled at the door, weeds through the driveway. On paper these are the best leads in the pile. In practice they cost me the most work per address. Two went to an estate where the heirs are in three states, one had a lien I couldn't get a clean answer on, and four had no forwarding address I could find at all. Great signal, terrible reachability.

Bucket two is occupied but clearly deferring maintenance. Roof plane sagging, gutters gone, siding open at a corner. Owner lives there and picks up the phone. Nobody in this bucket is desperate, so my discount is thinner, and half of them are insulted that I asked. But the ones who do engage move fast because there's one decision maker at one address.

My assignments so far came out of bucket two, both thin, one around $4,500. My theory is that bucket one produces the bigger spread when it closes and closes so rarely that the expected value is worse for a one-person operation with no title support.

That theory depends on my ability to find heirs being the binding constraint. If somebody here is closing vacant estates reliably, I'd like to know what part of the process I'm doing badly, because I'd rather fix that than concede the whole bucket.

devon_pierce · Accepted Answer

I'm not buying yet so take my numbers as list numbers, not deal numbers. But I've traced about 200 addresses now and the reachability gap you're describing shows up in mine too. Vacant properties trace to a person I can actually contact maybe a third of the time. Occupied deferred-maintenance addresses trace almost every time, because the owner is standing right there in the tax record at the same mailing address.

Where I'd push back is the conclusion. You're measuring expected value on six weeks and two thin assignments. The vacant bucket pays out over a longer clock, so a short window will always flatter the fast bucket. I'd keep mailing bucket one on a slow cadence and stop scoring it monthly.

aliyah_b · Answer

What did the two bucket-two assignments cost you in mail and trace before the fee landed?

gregpowell66 · Answer

Construction side of this, since you mentioned the roof plane. A sagging plane on an occupied house is often a 15 to 25 year old roof with sheathing that got wet, and the owner knows exactly what the repair quote was because someone already gave them one. That's why they engage. They've priced the problem and can't pay it. That is your actual lead signal, not the visual neglect on its own.

Boarded vacant is a different animal. By the time windows are covered, water has usually been in the structure for a while, and my experience pricing those is that the rehab number moves a lot after you open a wall. So the bigger spread you're assuming in bucket one may be partly an illusion created by an ARV minus a rehab estimate you can't hold.

Agree with bramble that six weeks tells you nothing about the estate clock. I'd say your process problem is heir research, and that's the one part of this I'd pay someone for rather than teach myself.

Vacant and boarded, or occupied with a failing roof? Argue me out of the second.

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