Unpopular opinion: your leads aren't saturated, your list is just lazy

Every week there's a post about lead lists being "burned out" or everyone getting the same data. And yeah, if you're buying a raw pull off a big platform, you're competing with 500 other investors texting the exact same 10,000 people. No wonder response rates are in the gutter.

But the list isn't the problem. The filtering is.

Here's what I've noticed after building a lot of these: a single distress list (just tax delinquent, or just absentee, or just pre-foreclosure) is weak on its own. Everyone has it. The gold is in the overlap. When you stack signals on the SAME property, you go from "maybe motivated" to "practically raising their hand."

Quick example of what I mean by stacking:

Tax delinquent (they're behind)

AND absentee owner (mailing address different from property address)

AND a code violation or nuisance flag (property is a headache to them)

AND owned 15+ years (equity to actually do a deal)

A list of 200 properties that hit 3 or 4 of those will smoke a list of 10,000 random skip-traced records. Fewer texts, way higher response, and you're not carpet-bombing people who will never sell. Your TCPA exposure drops too because you're touching fewer, better-targeted people.

Almost all of this data is sitting free on county auditor, treasurer, and sheriff sites. It just takes work to pull and cross-reference, which is exactly why most people don't do it and just buy the saturated list instead.

So my question for the room:

For those of you actually closing off-market deals right now, how many distress signals are you stacking before you pull the trigger on outreach? One? Three? Are you doing it manually or have you automated the cross-referencing?

So be honest, are the folks actually closing off-market deals filtering way harder than the rest of us, or am I overcomplicating a simple game?