Are apartments better than houses for door-to-door?

More doors per hour, more access restrictions, and a higher chance of being asked to leave mid-session. Which wins depends on your trade and on whether you are permitted to be there at all.

Will the app fill in apartment addresses?

More often than suburban ones. Measured address density in the map data is about 1.36 per building downtown and 0.02 to 0.12 in the suburbs, so autofill helps most where the doors are already dense.

Do I need permission to knock an apartment building?

Frequently yes, and knocking without it is the fastest way to be removed and remembered. Ask the management office before working the building.

Apartments versus subdivisions

Apartments put many more doors within walking distance and add an access problem that subdivisions do not have. Subdivisions cost you walking time between doors but rarely deny you entry. Address data also differs sharply: mapping data is dense in built-up areas and thin in the suburbs, so autofill helps in one and mostly does not in the other.

Density versus access

A single apartment building can hold more doors than several suburban streets, with none of the walking between them. That is the whole appeal, and it comes attached to gates, buzzers, on-site management and rules that may prohibit you outright.

Subdivisions invert both. Reaching a door is almost never the problem; the time between doors is.

Address data is not evenly good

This one is measurable and we measured it. Address density in the underlying map data runs about 1.36 addresses per building in a downtown area and between 0.02 and 0.12 per building in the suburbs where most door-to-door work happens.

In practice that means an app can often fill the whole address line for you in a built-up area, and in a typical subdivision will give you the street and leave you to type the number. That is fewer taps than typing all of it, and it is not rooftop-accurate everywhere, and we would rather say so than let you discover it on a driveway.

The day has a different shape

Apartment work is dense, fast and interruption-prone, and it ends abruptly when somebody asks you to leave the building. Suburban work is slower per door and far more predictable across a day.

Reps who are good at one are often not immediately good at the other, which is worth knowing before treating a bad first week in a new format as a verdict on the rep.

Common questions

Are apartments better than houses for door-to-door?: More doors per hour, more access restrictions, and a higher chance of being asked to leave mid-session. Which wins depends on your trade and on whether you are permitted to be there at all.
Will the app fill in apartment addresses?: More often than suburban ones. Measured address density in the map data is about 1.36 per building downtown and 0.02 to 0.12 in the suburbs, so autofill helps most where the doors are already dense.
Do I need permission to knock an apartment building?: Frequently yes, and knocking without it is the fastest way to be removed and remembered. Ask the management office before working the building.

More on door knocking

The craft of working a door: approach, first line, reading the house, what to do when nobody answers.

All of door knocking