I began my journey Driving for Dollars on Thursday, August 12. I’m continuing to do Driving for Dollars, but here are my results as of Wednesday, August 18:
Day 1: 43 homes in 69 mins
Day 2: 40 homes in 90 mins Day 3: 71 homes in 100 mins Day 4: 63 homes in 107 mins
What I learned:
I came up skunked in some neighborhoods. In a neighborhood of 200 houses, I might only get 5 and that’s even a stretch. I became very lucky in other neighborhoods and was able to get 20-30 homes (which equated to a house a minute). I have 5 years of home improvement construction experience, so determining whether to write an address down came naturally to me. I generally looked for the following:
- Deteriorated or missing siding (It's the first thing seen so, it makes it easiest to quickly evaluate.)
- Deteriorated or missing shutters (Missing shutters are easiest to spot, but it seems to take a second longer to evaluate the condition of the shutters.)
- Deteriorated roof (Most roofs seem easy to evaluate. I have to drive a little past the house to see some roofs.)
- Deteriorated or damaged windows (A little more difficult to spot quickly.)
- Rotten wood (This was the most difficult to see since it takes a couple of seconds to spot and rotten or deteriorated wood can be covered up.)
- Damaged mailbox (Either flag falling off, leaning mailbox, or mailbox door unable to close. I considered this to be close to a home run.)
- Overgrown lawn (The person could have been busy or lazy, but a certain growth seems to be a home run giveaway. Since most lawns seem to be decently mowed since it’s not a major expense, I rarely ran across overgrown lawns. This was roughly the last thing that I focused on.)
I mainly looked at the roof, shutters, and windows. If there was an issue with 1 but the other 2 were in great condition, then I would pass over the house. 2 or more was my ticket to write down the address, but I also used my experience in fixing up houses the most in qualifying whether I wanted to write the house number down or not.
I managed to see 2 yard signs with “WE BUY HOUSES <PHONE NUMBER>” written on them, so that gave me encouragement that I’m in the right neighborhoods (although I imagine it would scare off some people since they’d think that would indicate competition).
When searching for homes, I looked on Zillow for neighborhoods where at least 1 home was sold in the past 12 months and with a price range of $100k-$300k. I figured that this would allow me to look for deals in the hottest neighborhoods and I wouldn’t waste my time in neighborhoods too bad to fix a house in or too good to find deals. I stayed away from houses close to busy roads and railroad tracks.
I did this in the evenings, usually after work, so there were rare circumstances where I skipped over a house that I could have looked at closer (unless it was a definite write-down) if someone was standing outside of their home or doing something. So it would probably have been better to do it in the daytime, but I work during the daytime. A few people gave me dirty looks but I ignored them because I’m not doing anything illegal and I’m doing something constructive for their neighborhood (If I buy a house, fix it up and improve the appearance of their neighborhood, thus driving up the desirability of the neighborhood and property values).
My goal is to get 1,000 addresses written down and into a spreadsheet before my next real estate meetup.
