If you only get one outreach channel to start, which one?

The texting one is where I got lost too. Every platform sells it as a feature and then there's a paragraph in the terms saying you're responsible for compliance, which is a strange way to sell something. From what I've read consent rules and what counts as an existing relationship vary by state on top of the federal layer, so I stopped reading and didn't send anything. Not the answer you asked for, I know.

Quick definitions first, since the channels get talked about as if everyone already knows them.

Cold outreach means contacting an owner who has not asked to be contacted. You found them in data, they did not raise a hand. Skip tracing is the step where you take a name and property address and look up a phone number or mailing address for the owner, because the tax record usually only gives you the property. Your list of 300 becomes reachable only after skip tracing, and the match rate is never 100 percent.

On channels, the practical differences are cost per attempt and how many attempts you can personally make. Mail costs money per piece and almost no time. Calling costs time and very little money. Door knocking costs the most time per contact and gives you the most information, because you see the roof and the yard and whether anyone lives there.

On texting and recorded calls, consent and do-not-call requirements come from both federal rules and state statutes, and the state layer differs a lot. Some states are much stricter about texts and about calling cell numbers. That is a question for an attorney licensed where you are calling, before you send anything, and you should confirm current requirements rather than relying on a forum.

For a beginner with ten hours a week, the honest constraint is repetition. A channel you will run every week for six months beats a channel you admire and abandon in three.

Mail, and it isn't close for the kind of owner I chase. Absentee land owners are often out of state and older, and a letter reaches them without them having to do anything but read it. Phone numbers on those records are frequently ten years stale.

I voted mail and I'll admit part of it is that the phone genuinely scares me. But the other part is real: mail is the only channel where I can do the work on a Sunday afternoon and not need anyone on the other end to be available. With 300 records and $400 a month you could mail that list every month for a while and still eat.

Calling. You'll learn more about your own market in two weeks of calls than in six months of mail, because you hear the actual objections out of an actual owner's mouth. Mail teaches you nothing until someone calls back, and if nobody calls back you don't know whether the list was wrong or the letter was wrong.

@sable that assumes you can reach them. On my land lists the skip trace hit rate on a usable number is bad enough that calling would mean burning my whole list to find forty live humans. Mail at least lands in a mailbox that gets forwarded.

Run the arithmetic before you vote on feel. 300 records, mail at roughly 60 to 80 cents a piece all in for a plain letter, so under $250 a pass. Call the same 300 and you're paying for skip tracing plus a dialer, and the real cost is your ten hours. At maybe 25 to 35 dials an hour with a manual dialer you get through the reachable portion of that list in about a week and a half of your available time, and then you have nothing left to do until you pull more.

That's the part people skip. 300 records is a mail list, and it is not enough inventory to keep a caller busy. Either channel can work, the list size decides which one fits. If @rigging is capped at 300 records and $400, mail three or four times and spend the leftover hours expanding the list.

Before you pick anything, read the do-not-call terms in your platform contract and read whatever your state requires on recorded calls. Two-party consent states exist and the penalty language is not decorative. Ask a lawyer where you're calling.

And keep a record of where each number came from and when. If anyone ever asks, "the software gave it to me" is not documentation.

My company is in home services, and my team dials homeowners all day for a different reason, so here's the number that matters to me: our answer rate on cold cell numbers sits somewhere around 8 to 12 percent depending on the week and the area code. That means 300 records is roughly 30 conversations if the numbers are good, spread over a lot of dials. It's not nothing. It's also not a pipeline. @sextant is right that the list is the binding constraint here.

Genuinely asking, is door knocking on a stranger's house about buying it something you need a license for anywhere? I assumed no but I assumed no about a few other things too.

@plumb solicitation permits are a city ordinance thing in a lot of places, and whether talking to an owner about buying their own property counts as brokerage activity depends on your state's licensing statute, so check the ordinance and check with someone licensed there. I knock a handful of doors a year on parcels I actually want and I've never had a bad reception. Old owners talk. They'll tell you about the neighbor who died and the estate nobody's dealing with, which is worth more than the door you knocked on.

Mail, same list, four times, four different letters. The version that works is dull and repeatable.

My last two off-market buys came from neither. One came from a tenant in a building I own who mentioned her old landlord was done, and one came from a handyman who works three of my units. If I'm handing a beginner one channel I'd nearly hand them relationships, except a beginner doesn't have any yet, which is the whole problem with that answer.

Whichever you pick, log every attempt and outcome in a spreadsheet from day one. Cost per conversation and conversations per contract are the only two numbers that will tell you in month four whether to keep going or switch, and you can't reconstruct them later from memory.

Nobody's voted for agents yet and I think that's a mistake. Plenty of agents sit on sellers who won't list, expired listings, people who called them and then went cold. That's off-market inventory with a warm introduction attached and it costs you coffee.

@beacon it costs more than coffee, it costs having something to offer them. An agent hands a beginner nothing, because the beginner can't close and can't pay them. That relationship gets built after you have one deal done, not before.

Adding to @cairn, if you're going the calling route also look at whether your state's licensing statute has anything to say about how you describe yourself on that call. The line between "I buy houses" and "I can help you sell your house" matters in some states and not others, and the answer comes from your state commission rather than from here.

The owners most ready to sell are usually the ones who just got a bad turnover bill. I'd talk to small property managers in your area before I'd mail anyone. They know exactly which owners are done and they have no reason to keep it secret if you're pleasant about it.

Six months in, no deals, and I can tell you exactly which channel I picked: the one that didn't require me to talk to anyone. Mail, twice, then I stopped. @cairn's framing stings a bit but it's right, I avoided the phone and called it a strategy.

Coming off job sites I notice roofs and fascia before anything else, so I drove my two target areas on Saturdays and wrote down 40 addresses that looked deferred. Cross-referenced them against the assessor site for owner mailing address. Nine were absentee. Those nine got hand-addressed letters and two called me. Tiny numbers, but the hit rate beat anything I got off a big pull, because the condition signal came from my own eyes.

I voted calling for the same reason as @cairn even though I hate it. Starting from zero, the skill compounds and the postage doesn't.

I wanted to see conversion data by channel before voting and then realized nobody in this room can give me that at a size that means anything, because it's all one person's list in one market. So I voted for the one I'd actually do on a Tuesday night when I'm tired. That's door knocking for me, which surprised me.

Fair warning on calling if you ever scale it past yourself. Training someone to hold a seller conversation properly took me far longer and far more money than I budgeted, and a bad caller burns the list permanently. Doing it yourself first is the cheap version, which is another point for @cairn's answer.

I run both and the conversations from mail are better. Someone who kept your letter for three weeks and then dialed you is already halfway there, and I've closed those at better spreads. The problem is you get almost none of them, so you sit around. Calling gives you volume of mediocre conversations. For a beginner with no deals and no confidence, volume of mediocre is the right medicine.

@rigging one thing to hold onto: your $400 a month is outreach spend, and it isn't the money that gets you to a closing. Earnest money, inspection, title work, and whatever the exit needs come after. I'd want to know your total number before I picked the channel that generates the most contracts, because generating one you can't perform on is worse than generating none.

How wrong are skip traced numbers usually? I keep reading them described as if they're reliable and then @parcel says most of his are dead, and I can't tell which is normal.

@juniper depends entirely on the owner type. Owner-occupied in a metro, decent. Out of state absentee who inherited in 2009, terrible. That's why the channel argument keeps looping in this thread, everyone's talking about a different owner.

@rigging, whatever you pick, the thing that killed my first year was switching every six weeks because nothing worked yet. Nothing works yet at week six in any channel.