Driving for Dollars vs Listsource

[Adrien C.]

Howdy- I am a wholesaler. I love the hunt of finding a good property. One thing I do is drive for dollars. I drop my kids off at school at 8am and don't have to be at my office until 9am so I drive up and down the neighborhoods.  I know the 2 towns I'm targeting very well so I pick neighborhoods to drive on garbage day. It helps to confirm a vacant house when they have overgrown landscaping/grass plus no garbage out. I can usually find 8-10 houses per drive. On Fridays, I schedule a half day at work and use the rest of the day to look up records to find the owner. As much as I like the hunt, I realize it's not the most efficient use of time/resources. Today I purchased a list (vacant homes, in/out state owners, 60-100% equity). The list had 270 addresses in the two towns (total population about 40K). The initial list was at 1200 before I added in the equity factor.

I searched the addresses I gathered from driving to the list and out of 25 in this town, not one showed up. Is this because the house isn't really vacant or is it because the house probably doesn't fit the equity parameter I set? Do you think it's still worth the time to track down the owner and mail letters?

Thanks for your input