If its leaking you're looking at much larger dollars, lots of testing and holding costs.

Any other ideas on the process for inventing and testing a niche?

After testing several different types, I find this one to be the most responsive.You will get duds.

I've searched the web but can't find a service who will call back real estate leads to test for motivation.

Ciro, although the "Sniff" test seems like a good deal, run the numbers yourself.

I would first do a mold test to see if those are black mold.

Test him out and see how he does.

A mix of this and what @Will Barnard mentioned seems like a good way of testing the waters.

If their documentation is substantially different from their tax return I would be pretty careful with my approach to the deal.After assessing their reported expenses, you need to recalibrate with your own expense assumptions, near and mid term capital upgrades to arrive a CAP rate that will cash flow, pay for repairs, maintenance, upgrades and save enough money to replace end-of-life infrastructure.Your plan of test driving your analysis skills on several real live properties is a good one.

On second thought I would have only sent out a limited number of direct mail anyways (in order to test different messages, YLs, postcards, etc.), so the lower number shouldn't necessarily be discouraging.