The drive gives you timing and physical condition, and the list gives you scale. They're answering different questions.
A vacancy or delinquency flag is a record event. Something had to be filed, missed, or reported before it showed up in a database, and by then every other investor subscribing to that vendor has the same row. Physical distress shows up first. A tarped roof, a dead lawn in July, a mailbox stuffed with flyers, plywood on a window, none of that files anything with the county. The owner may be six months away from becoming a data point and years away from being motivated on paper.
The second thing the drive gives you is condition, which the list is silent on. Two absentee-owned houses on the same street can be $15,000 apart in repairs and identical in the data. If you're funding acquisitions, that difference is your whole margin.
What you correctly identified is the scale ceiling. One person driving covers a slice of one metro, and no amount of app tooling changes the number of streets in a day. That's why operators who run volume treat driving as a supplement to bought data rather than a replacement, or they hire drivers and accept the management overhead.
If you're evaluating this as something to fund, the question worth asking an operator is what happens to their lead flow when they personally stop driving. Plenty of driving-based pipelines are one person's attention, and that isn't an asset you can buy into with any confidence.
