What does lassoing do?

Draws a loop on the map and turns every address inside it into a door on your route.

Will it fill in the house numbers?

Sometimes, and you cannot predict where from how the neighbourhood looks. Coverage ranged from 0.03 to 0.90 points per building across 16 Texas neighbourhoods and follows the jurisdiction, not the density. Street names are far more consistent at 71-83% everywhere.

Does lassoing work offline?

Yes, for areas you saved before losing signal. The map and the addresses are read from the phone.

Taking a whole block at once

Lassoing means drawing a loop around a block on the map so every address inside becomes a door you can work. It replaces tapping houses one at a time and is the fastest way to set up a session. It is the wrong move when the area is larger than the session, because it produces a route you will abandon partway.

What it replaces

Tapping forty houses individually before you start. That is several minutes of setup at the point in the day when you least want to be looking at a phone.

Where the addresses come from

The map data itself rather than a purchased list. Coverage is uneven in a way that surprises people: measured across 16 Texas neighbourhoods it ran from 0.03 to 0.90 address points per building, and neighbouring suburbs differed by a factor of twenty because it follows which city imported addresses rather than how built-up the area is.

So in a city centre you usually get a full address line, and in a typical subdivision you get the street and type the number. Fewer taps than typing all of it, and not rooftop-accurate everywhere.

When not to

When you lasso more than you can finish. The setup is so cheap that it encourages over-selecting, and an unfinished lasso leaves the same messy boundary as any abandoned route.

Common questions

What does lassoing do?: Draws a loop on the map and turns every address inside it into a door on your route.
Will it fill in the house numbers?: Sometimes, and you cannot predict where from how the neighbourhood looks. Coverage ranged from 0.03 to 0.90 points per building across 16 Texas neighbourhoods and follows the jurisdiction, not the density. Street names are far more consistent at 71-83% everywhere.
Does lassoing work offline?: Yes, for areas you saved before losing signal. The map and the addresses are read from the phone.

More on routes

Planning the walk: ordering doors, cutting dead time between them, and route tools compared.

All of routes