Cold mail to the tax address versus skip tracing every land owner, which earns its cost
For land acquisition specifically, cold mail to the county tax roll address tends to perform better than it does on houses, since a land owner has usually been paying the tax bill from a stable address for years, keeping undeliverable rates low, often in the single digits. Skip tracing the full list and calling adds real cost, mostly in labor rather than per-record fees, but it reaches the detached owner and the heir who moved away, exactly the profile least likely to respond to mail and most likely to sell at a workable price because the parcel carries no emotional weight for them. The pattern that tends to hold at volume is that mail response rates are high enough on land that calling can look like solving a problem that doesn't exist, but the deals that come off mail are often the easier, lower-fee ones, while the deals worth the most tend to hide behind a stale tax address that only a skip trace and a phone call reach. At meaningful volume, a hybrid approach usually wins: mail the full list cheaply as the baseline, and skip trace only the returned-mail and long-hold subset, since that is where the underused, harder-to-reach owners concentrate.
At 1,000 records a month on land, where does the money go?
25 votes
