Skip Tracing

What it is

Skip tracing is taking a list and getting the phone numbers and email addresses for the property owners on it. You start with addresses and owner names from a list provider like Property Radar or PropStream. You run that through a skip trace service and it returns phone numbers, emails, relatives, and alternate addresses pulled from public records, credit headers, utility data, and aggregated data brokers.

Once I have my list, I either skip trace it to get phone numbers for cold calling, or I take it straight to a mailhouse and mail every month. Those are the two paths. Either you cold call because you have time and no money, or you have the money and send mail and wait for phone calls to come in.

Why it matters

I ran a million dollar a year wholesale company. We did 100-plus deals a year. And the fundamental thing I figured out, years into this, is that everybody had their hands in my pocket — wholesalers, realtors, everybody. The whole point of direct-to-seller marketing is cutting out those middlemen. Skip tracing is what makes calling or texting possible at all.

Without it, you’re on the passive channel. Mail goes out, seller decides if they want to call back, most don’t. Skip tracing flips the ratio. Instead of waiting for 1 in 1,000 to call you, you can reach out yourself. The response rate per outbound contact is lower per message, but the timing and volume are in your hands. You control when the conversation happens.

Same list, you can run layered campaigns: mailer goes out, follow-up call a few weeks later. A seller who ignored the first two touches might pick up on the third because something in their life changed — a tenant moved out, a bill came in, a family member called about the house.

How it shows up

After the list is built, you take it through a skip tracer — Property Radar and PropStream both have them built in, or you can use separate services. You load the list in, it comes back with phone one, phone two (sometimes that’s them, sometimes it’s their mom or dad, just something attached to them from the data), plus emails. Then you take those numbers and either call manually or load them into a dialer like Batch Dialer or Enzo. Those dialers hit multiple numbers at once, which is why you sometimes get calls from marketers where nobody’s there — they dialed 14 numbers, multiple people picked up, system took the first one, everybody else got silence.

Compliance matters. Cold calling and texting are regulated. Do-not-call list, TCPA, state-level consent rules, platform restrictions on texting. You need to scrub your list for people on the DNC before you dial. And if somebody asks to be removed, remove them. Keep a suppression list and feed it back into the skip trace service. “I will remove you from the list” isn’t just good manners, it’s a legal requirement.

The service tier matters too. Cheap skip tracers return whatever numbers are easiest to find, which means dead numbers, wrong numbers, and angry relatives. Premium services cross-reference multiple data sources and score the numbers by likelihood of reaching the current owner. Pay for quality. Calling bad numbers burns your time and your patience, and patience is the resource you’re most short on when you’re dialing all day.

Related

list building, direct mail, cold outreach, off market, motivated seller, driving for dollars