Listsource Missing Data

[Account Closed]

I purchased a list of 2-300 Units in 1 zip code and quickly found that the data isn't as accurate as I was expecting. For starters, the multi-family I own isn't on the list. The only other criteria I had selected was "address completeness - mailing and property address complete".

I'm hesitant about buying more lists from them if data is missing. Is this common?

[Sean OToole]

The only real benefit of Realquest is being able to see the full record on a property. This is important when troubleshooting lists, as you can a) look at samples from your list to see if they are really what you want, and b) look at samples that were not included in your list, and see why they weren't included.

Public records data is very messy, and varies from county to county, and even by year built, or other odder variations. The reason for this is that it is managed by people at the county assessor. If at some point they decide to start tracking something new, they don't necessarily go back and update every old record. We see this a lot with fields like Units (the number of separate dwelling units within the property). It's an awesome criteria when looking for multifamily and apartments, but it is super unreliable and we find very few counties that have good unit data on every building in their county.

Using things like mailing address complete can also throw a wrench in the works. Listsource AND Realquest are showing you what the county has for each property, and they aren't worried about things like deliverability. I'd recommend NOT using that filter (address complete), and instead, doing that as a second step before you actually mail your mailer (there are lots of address verification services you can use to do that, which are far superior to CL's filter anyway). If you are about to complain about paying for the extra leads that are undeliverable, you need to understand that those are the most valuable. Why? Because lots of noobs only get the leads with complete addresses, or don't take the time to research returned mail, which means that the leads with mailing problems get very little attention and are much more likely to respond. I've known investors whose entire businesses have been built off skip tracing the undeliverables.