Skip tracing every owner vs mailing cold to the tax address

I hit a ceiling doing exactly what you describe in option A. Mail only, four counties, and the fees flattened around 6 to 8k because the sellers who respond to mail have already decided to sell and they've usually got a number in their head from a neighbor's sale. Adding calls didn't raise my volume much. It raised the fee per deal, because I got to the owners who never think about the parcel at all. That took about five months to show up in the numbers though, so if you're deciding this quarter you won't know.

Quarry, your 6 percent undeliverable number is doing a lot of work in this and I'd check it differently. Undeliverable means the post office couldn't deliver. It doesn't mean the piece reached a person who has authority to sell. Deceased owner, mail still gets delivered to the house, nobody with standing opens it. That's invisible in your return rate.

Windlass is right and it's bigger on land than on houses. I've spent years on the zoning side of this and the owner of record on a rural parcel is wrong more often than people expect. Estates that never got probated, LLCs that dissolved, deeds from the sixties with three siblings on them. The tax bill keeps going to an address and someone keeps paying it, sometimes a family member with no legal interest at all. Whether that person can sign is a question for an attorney every single time, and it varies by state. What I'd tell you, Quarry, is don't split this as mail versus call. Segment by ownership shape first. Individual owner, single name, recent deed, mail is fine. Multiple names, out of state, deed older than 25 years, that stack is worth calling because the whole deal is going to be a title conversation anyway. My best acquisitions have all come out of that second pile and they take three times as long to close.

Still working out what the first deal costs so I'm reading this for the budget line. If skip tracing is cents per record, what's the actual all in on 1,000 records with calls? Postage on 1,000 is what, 600 or so with printing? And then the calling is your own hours. I want to know the number before I pick a side.

Never heard that the tax roll was public until now, and all of this is new to me. Is that every county?

Rigging, most counties put the roll or the parcel viewer online, but the format is all over the place and some make you request it or pay for a bulk file. Also worth knowing that about a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, so in those you can get the owner and the address but not what anyone paid. Five years running my own shop and the lesson that transfers is that Parcel's segmentation answer is the one that scales, because it tells you where to spend the only thing you can't buy more of.

Working through licensing right now and the thing that jumps out is calling. Depending on the state and how you're doing it, cold calling landowners can run into do not call rules and consent questions that don't apply to mail at all. I'm not going to pretend to know how it lands in any given state, that's a lawyer question. But the cost comparison people run here almost never includes compliance setup on the call side, and it isn't zero.

Fast and thin over here, so my answer is biased. I mail wide and call only the segment Parcel described, and Halyard, I did have to get real about the consent side before I turned calls on. Quarry, one thing nobody said: your two contracts this quarter aren't enough to compare channels. I had a stretch where hand written mail looked twice as good as everything else and it was four deals of noise. Keystone's five months is closer to honest.