Driving for Dollars
Physically driving neighborhoods to spot distressed or vacant properties, logging addresses to research and pursue off-market.
Driving for dollars is the boots-on-the-ground lead source: an investor drives target neighborhoods looking for visible signs of distress or vacancy — overgrown yards, boarded windows, code-violation notices, full mailboxes — and records each address to research later. The properties found this way are almost always off-market and rarely on anyone else's list.
The addresses are only the start. Each one still needs skip tracing to find the owner and outreach to make contact, which is why apps and virtual assistants now feed driving-for-dollars routes straight into a list to be traced and worked.
Related terms