A neighbor told me more in ten minutes than four weeks of list pulling
This is a small one but it's my first contract so I'm writing it up.
I'd been driving a couple of older streets after work with a notes app, writing down anything with a full mailbox or grass past the window line. One house had a blue tarp on the back corner of the roof and a car in the drive that hadn't moved across three visits.
I couldn't find the owner. The tax record had a name and an address that came back undeliverable when I mailed it. So on the fourth pass I knocked next door instead, said I was interested in the house with the tarp, and asked if they knew what was going on with it.
The neighbor talked for ten minutes. The owner had moved to be near a daughter about two hours away, the tarp went up after a storm two winters ago, and the daughter's name was one the neighbor knew. That was enough to find her, and she picked up.
She didn't want the house. She wanted it gone before another winter and she was clear that she wasn't going to do repairs or clean it out. Contract at 79k on something that comps in the 150s in fixed condition with roughly 55k of work, most of it the roof and whatever the roof let in.
I assigned it for 6k to a flipper who's done four houses in that pocket. Not life changing money. It's the first time I've done the whole thing start to finish.
What I'd keep: knocking on the neighbor's door instead of the target house. Nobody's defensive when you're asking about someone else's property.