$1,900 of list and skip trace spend, and I never called one owner

anchor this is uncomfortably close to my own spreadsheet. I'm on month three, 1,100 records, and I found myself last Tuesday deciding whether to exclude mobile homes. I have not called anyone either. The exclusion did not matter.

What's the actual cost per conversation supposed to look like? You spent $1,900 for zero, which is an infinite number, but I have no idea what good is. Is a person who's doing this well paying $5 a conversation or $80?

sable, the number that matters is cost per signed contract, and it varies enough by market and channel that anyone quoting you a single figure is quoting their market, not yours. The structure is more stable than the price. Records go in, some share have a reachable phone or a deliverable address, some share of those produce a conversation, a small share of conversations produce an appointment, and a small share of appointments produce a contract. Every step of that funnel loses an order of magnitude somewhere, which is why the total spend looks fine on a spreadsheet and terrible after four weeks of effort.

anchor, your spend bought data. A contract comes from conversations, and you had none, so the money bought you nothing except a habit of filtering. The 50 name rule you landed on is the right shape.

The thing the whole plan depends on is repeat contact. Single-touch outreach converts badly almost everywhere, and most people who get a deal from a cold list got it on touch four or later, months after the first attempt. If you're not willing to build a follow-up cadence, buying more data won't fix the output.

One practical caution. Data quality varies a lot by state, since roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, which makes equity estimates on those lists guesses rather than measurements. Check what your platform actually knows in your county before you trust an equity filter. And rules on calling, texting and mailing cold contacts differ by state and by channel, so confirm what applies to yours with someone licensed before you start dialing.

For what it's worth, the guys I've worked for in the trades find half their deals by having a roofer or a plumber mention a house. Costs nothing. I'm not saying skip the list, but if you're only looking for one rental, four months of data spend to find one owner is a strange trade.

The eighty times looking at the spreadsheet is the part that got me. What did you think was going to change on the eighty-first?

$1,900 across four months is $475 a month for optionality you never used. I'd have felt the same way, honestly, which is why I'm reading this room instead of buying software yet.

anchor, question: if the goal is one rental to hold, are you sure direct outreach is even the cheaper path for you? A wholesaler's fee on one deal might be less than a year of this.

meridian's point is the one I'd sit with. I do a lot of due diligence work and the honest constraint on a single-property buyer is attention, not money. You're building a machine that only makes sense if you run it for years.

anchor, if you do keep going, track two things only. Calls attempted and conversations had. Everything else is decoration until those two numbers are non-zero.

I'm planning my first purchase carefully and this thread is a useful warning that careful and stalled look identical from the outside. I'm going to write down what I'm allowed to change and when.