Six months of probate data, nothing closed. Here's where the money went.

The three counties thing lands for me. I'm in a rural market and I tried to cover four counties at once because no single one has enough filings to be worth the subscription. What I didn't account for is that the drive between them is two hours end to end, so I couldn't actually go look at anything on short notice. Half my no-shows were just me being 90 minutes away when someone said come by tomorrow.

$4,600 for 61 calls is $75 a call and $1,150 per offer written. Those aren't crazy numbers for a first campaign, the problem is you only wrote four offers off 22 real conversations. That's the ratio I'd stare at. Either the properties genuinely didn't work or you were disqualifying yourself before the seller did. Do you know which?

The answering service part interests me because that's a service business decision, not an investing one. Did you ever try a real person you knew, even part time? I've been looking at what the service layer around investors actually gets paid for, and "someone who can hold a difficult first call with a grieving family" seems like it should command more than $180 a month.

The eleven weeks is the part I'd want to prevent, and it's a documents problem. Letters of authority, or whatever your state calls them, are the piece of paper that says who can sign for the estate, and until someone shows you a copy you have a contract with a person, not with the estate. Some states also restrict what the representative can do without a court order, so even a properly appointed PR isn't automatically free to sell. You'd want the estate's attorney confirming in writing what applies in your county. I'd have asked for a copy of the letters before I spent a site visit on it, and I say that as someone who reads documents for fun, so discount accordingly.

The allocation change you landed on is the right shape, and the mechanism behind it is worth stating plainly.

Your timing observation matches what the channel structurally does. Probate cases sit open for months, often longer, and the decision to sell real property tends to arrive after the representative is appointed and the estate's obligations are visible. Mailing at filing puts you in front of people before there's a decision to make. Mailing at four and eight months puts you closer to it. That is a sequencing choice, not a volume choice, and it costs you nothing extra.

On @meridian's question, four offers from 22 conversations is the number that decides whether this was a data problem or a conversion problem. If most of those 22 had property that genuinely didn't pencil, one county at $340 a month may not produce enough volume for you to hit a deal, and the answer is a wider net or a second channel. If they did pencil and you didn't make the ask, more data won't fix it.

On authority, the general mechanism is that a court appoints someone to act for the estate and issues documentation of that appointment, and the scope of what they can do without further court approval varies by state and sometimes by the type of administration granted. Confirm the specific requirement with the estate's attorney before you spend time on diligence.

The attorney relationship spending is the piece that compounds. Data is available to everyone paying the same $340. Being the buyer a probate attorney thinks of first is not.

One assumption your revised plan depends on: that one county produces enough filings with real property in it to give you 20-plus conversations over six months. Count that before you commit.

The answering service failing isn't really about the answering service. You outsourced the highest-skill conversation in your whole funnel to the cheapest labor in it. I did the same thing with estimate calls for two years and wondered why my close rate was bad, and it took five years of running a service business before that clicked.

I'd push back slightly on the four-touch cadence being the main lever. I mail probate too and my best deals came from touch six and seven, which is way past where most people quit. If you'd kept the same 600 records and mailed nine times over eighteen months instead of four times over six, same spend roughly, I think you'd have a different post. The 4-month start still makes sense, I just wouldn't shorten the tail to fund it.

Coming from zero, the useful thing here is that you counted. I've got no campaign yet and I already know I'd never have written down that 22 conversations turned into 4 offers, I'd have just remembered feeling busy. Saving this.