There have been some featured posts in the past few days concerning door knockers. Does door knocking open new doors for Realtors looking for business in neighborhoods new to them, or even where they live make sense? Is it a bad practice. Greg Nino is strongly against it in his post Door Knocking For Business Is Dangerous, Desperate & Borderline Pathetic...
and there have been several comments supporting his view point.

In his post Greg refers to a featured post and I think it was the one by Durrell Thomas entitled For Door Knocking, This Works Like Crazy. Durell provided a script which he uses and several commentators have agreed with him that door knocking is probably an effective tool. Both posts have in the neighborhood of 70 comments and I'm not keeping score, but am interested in the dialogue.

I learned years ago from a young woman who, with me as her agent, liked a home in a neighborhood she didn't know well, but she liked the house enough to make an offer. There were multiple offers on many homes at the time and she wrote an aggressive offer, but asked me to hold on to it until she did her version of a neighborhood review. Offers were to be presented the following day and I took my turn. We were $5K less than the highest offer, but the seller said "I have to take this one." My client had gone out and knocked on every door in the neighborhood and introduced herself. She told the people who answered that she wanted to buy that house but first she wanted to know who lived around it and what they were like. The seller said he had to take it because the neighbors told him that they wanted that woman to be a part of the neighborhood.

Whatever your reasons are for door knocking or not, go ahead. But the best way for a buyer to know a neighborhood is to become a part of it without relying entirely on what the listing or selling agent says, or what police reports or blogs say.