My VA built a 1,900 record mail list. A third of it was garbage.

The 100 row sample is the fix and it works for basically every VA deliverable. I won't accept a finished anything anymore. First slice, review, then the rest.

Verbal criteria on a call is where this died. I'm still getting licensed and even I've learned that a spoken instruction to someone in a different time zone with an accent gap in both directions is going to lose about 15% of itself. Written, then read back.

Did the agency offer any kind of QC layer, or was it just a body and a login? I've been trying to understand what the markup actually buys and this feels like the test case.

beacon, at $8.50/hr the markup buys recruiting and payroll. QC is a different price point.

The dedupe issue isn't a VA problem at all, it's a tooling problem, and I've watched it play out for five years in a service business. Nobody should be deduping 1,900 rows by eye. That's a formula, it takes four minutes, and it should be a standing step in the SOP so it happens whether the person is good or bad that day. girder, if you build one document out of this whole mess, build the checklist for what the file has to pass before it goes to print.

The three letters to one owner thing actually made me laugh, because I've done it to tenants with renewal notices. Same root cause. You're keying off the parcel when the human is the unit.

One thing worth checking before your next drop, and this varies by state, is whether the counties you pulled from publish what you think they publish. Roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public at all, and assessor mailing address fields get stale at different rates by county. Your 412 undeliverables might be partly the source rather than the VA.

warrant makes the point I'd make. Undeliverable rate on absentee mail is often 8 to 12% even with a clean pull, so 412 out of 1,914 is high but the whole excess isn't the VA either. girder, if you split your number, roughly 190 pieces were probably always going to bounce and the rest is process. That still leaves you around $1,400 of avoidable spend on the dupes and the wrong county, which is the figure I'd carry forward.

$3,500 to learn to inspect the work in progress. Cheaper than most tuition, worse than reading one thread first.

sextant's split is the useful reframe. I'd add that the two weekends of cleanup are a real cost even though they never hit the card. If girder values his own night hours at anything, the total is closer to $2,000 avoidable, and that changes whether a $200 QC add-on from the agency was worth buying. It was.

Land guy here so my lists are messier than yours by nature. The one step I'd add to your checklist, girder: pull a random 25 rows from the finished file and look them up yourself before print, every single time, even after the VA has been perfect for six months. Takes 20 minutes. Caught a bad county filter for me in month nine with someone I'd have sworn was flawless.