Every investor eventually faces this question. Do I keep grinding my own lead generation, or do I buy a feed and call instead? The right answer depends on your stage, your hourly rate, and what your time is actually worth. Below is the math, with no salesy thumb on the scale.
The two paths
Generating your own leads means you do the work: driving for dollars, pulling public records, running mail campaigns, paying for SEO or PPC, attending REIA meetings, building a referral network. The output is a list of property owners you can contact.
Buying leads means you pay a service that has already done the data assembly. The output is the same list, but you traded money for time.
Most people frame this as a binary. It is not. Most successful investors do both, with the mix shifting as their business matures.
What it actually costs to generate your own
Let me work through a realistic 90-day plan for one county. Assume you want to call 1,000 motivated seller leads in that window.
Driving for dollars: Three hours of driving fills roughly forty addresses for the cost of gas. Doing 1,000 addresses this way is 75 hours behind the wheel. If you value your time at $25 per hour (modest), that is $1,875 in opportunity cost. Plus gas, plus skip tracing 1,000 addresses at $0.20 each ($200). Total: about $2,075, mostly your time.
Direct mail to absentee owners: Pull a list from PropStream or your county records ($99 per month for PropStream, prorated to $33 for one month of use). Mail 1,000 yellow letters at $0.65 each: $650. Total: $683. Faster than driving, more expensive in real dollars, less of your time.
Public records (probate, tax delinquent, code violations): Pulling these from one county for ninety days takes maybe ten hours of work, mostly figuring out the county's specific filing system the first time. After that, two or three hours per month to stay current. Skip trace the leads at $0.20 each. For 1,000 leads at this scale you probably cannot hit 1,000 from public records alone in one county; you might get 200 to 400 depending on county size. Total for the records you do pull: roughly $80 to $150, plus your time.
PPC and SEO: A motivated seller PPC campaign in a competitive market runs $15 to $45 per click and converts at maybe 3 to 8 percent to a form fill. So a form-fill lead costs $200 to $1,500 depending on market. SEO is cheaper per lead long-term but takes six to twelve months to start producing.
If you piece together the cheapest realistic combination (driving + records + a small mail campaign), you can probably hit 1,000 leads for around $1,200 to $2,500 in ninety days, of which a large portion is your time. The cost per lead works out to roughly $1.20 to $2.50.
What buying actually costs
The market for off-market lead feeds is fragmented. A few rough price points as of 2026:
- PropStream: $99 per month for the database access (you still pull lists yourself). Add skip tracing at $0.12 to $0.20 per record. Not a feed; a data platform.
- BatchLeads: Similar model, $99 to $199 per month plus per-skip pricing.
- DealMachine: Driver app plus list pulls. Plans run $59 to $249 per month.
- Legacy Leads (us): Per-county pricing. Counties with under ten leads per month bundle together at $30/month for the bundle. Counties with steady volume run $4 per average monthly lead, with a $25 floor and $500 cap. A typical mid-volume county lands at $60 to $200 per month, all-in.
- BiggerPockets-listed lead resellers: Varies wildly, anywhere from $1.50 to $15 per lead depending on type and freshness.
For a 1,000-lead, 90-day window in one mid-volume county, expect to pay roughly $300 to $800 in subscription fees across the cheaper services, and $2,500 to $15,000 if you go for premium per-lead pricing. The cost per lead lands somewhere between $0.30 and $15.
The honest comparison
Generating your own is cheaper in cash, more expensive in time. Buying is the inverse. The crossover depends on two numbers: what is your hour actually worth, and how good is your list-pulling skill.
For a new investor with no deals closed, generating your own is probably the right call. Not because the math is better, but because the process teaches you what distressed properties look like, what owners actually say on the phone, and which neighborhoods produce the right opportunities. You cannot buy that intuition.
For an investor with a proven playbook who is trying to scale, the calculus flips. Every hour you spend assembling lists is an hour you cannot spend on the activities that actually produce closes: calling leads, negotiating, and closing transactions. Paying $200 per month to have someone else maintain the lead pipeline is cheap if it frees up ten hours that would otherwise go to data work.
A worked example: ninety days, one county, two approaches
Setup: You work Travis County, TX. You want to close two wholesale deals this quarter. Average assignment fee in your market is $10,000.
Approach A, generate your own:
- Pull tax delinquent list (free, 3 hours).
- Pull probate filings for the quarter (free, 8 hours).
- Drive 25 hours over the quarter (gas: $120).
- Mail 1,500 absentee owners ($975).
- Skip trace 800 records ($160).
- Total cash out: $1,255. Total your time: 36 hours.
- Leads in pipeline: roughly 1,200 to 1,500.
Approach B, buy the feed:
- Subscribe to Travis County feed for three months ($200 per month, give or take, depending on lead volume).
- Use the saved 36 hours on calls and negotiation.
- Total cash out: $600. Total your time: 0 on data work.
- Leads delivered: based on actual Travis County volume, probably 200 to 400 fresh leads over the quarter.
Notice approach A produces more raw leads but consumes 36 hours. Approach B produces fewer but freshier leads at lower cash cost and zero data work.
If your dial-to-close ratio is 1 in 600, you need 1,200 dials to close 2 deals. Approach A gives you the volume but eats your weekends. Approach B requires you to also pick up a smaller secondary source (a few hours of driving plus the bought feed) to hit volume. The combined approach almost always wins for a busy investor.
Where Legacy Leads fits
We are a feed, not a database tool. The pitch is narrow: you pick the counties you actually work, we pull off-market seller signals (probate, vacant, absentee, code violations, inherited) across 500+ US counties, enrich with current owner contact info, and deliver daily. Pricing scales with what each county produces, so you do not pay flat for a county that gives you four leads a month.
This is the right tool if you have a playbook and want a steady pipeline without maintaining one. It is the wrong tool if you are still figuring out your market and need the hands-on learning of pulling your own lists.
Create a free account, look at the live counts in the counties you work, and decide if the per-county math makes sense for your business. The setup takes about 30 seconds and you can browse without entering a card.