Driving for dollars and sending letters?!

[Ross V.]

Hey BP Network, looking for some fellow wholesaler's best practices. 

My mentor group is teach me to drive for dollars to locate houses that look distressed or that fit our investors buying criteria. Then if no one is loving there placing door hangers/flyers and taking down the address. After the drive, using the address we search out to find the owner via the assessors website, etc. Once we find the mailing address(es) we plug them into our spread sheet and do a mail merge to generate letters of intent documents. These all need to be mailed out (paid postage, etc). 

My questions is, are other wholesalers finding this to be best practice to locate properties? 

My background (and day job) is in inbound marketing and outbound business development. 

Personally, I feel my time, efforts, and $ would be better spent on creating advertising/social networking to drive traffic to my landing pages. 

How are my fellow BP wholesalers locating properties? 

Thanks in advance for your support and contributions! 

-Ross