What driving for dollars is, how to do it, the apps investors use — and why scoring a whole market by data reaches the same sellers faster.
Driving for dollars is the practice of driving through neighborhoods to spot distressed or vacant properties, noting the addresses, and then contacting the owners. It's a classic way to find off-market deals — and it still works — but it's slow and hard to scale.
You pick a neighborhood, drive it, and look for signs of a motivated seller: overgrown yards, boarded windows, tarped roofs, code-violation notices, or long-vacant homes. You log each address, look up the owner, skip trace them, and reach out by mail or phone.
Apps let you tag properties as you drive, then skip trace and mail the owners. They make the logging easier, but you're still limited to what one person can physically drive past.
Instead of driving to find distressed owners, you can score every owner in a ZIP by the same signals — equity, tenure, absentee status, distress — and mail the best ones. You reach the same motivated sellers (and many the drive would miss) without the windshield time. That's Farmrix's approach, and it's why many investors treat it as a DealMachine alternative.
Reach the same sellers without the drive.
Score every owner, not just the ones you drove past.
Equity, tenure, vacancy and distress, scored automatically.
The best owners are mailed for you — no manual logging.
Hours of driving replaced by a ranked list.