Skip Trace Before or After Search?
When you identify investors near a property, you have a list of names and addresses but usually no phone numbers or emails. Skip tracing fills that gap — but should you trace everyone on the list or only the ones most likely to buy? The answer affects both your cost and your conversion rate.
Option 1: Skip trace after search (recommended)
The most cost-effective approach is to search first, rank investors by activity and relevance, and then skip trace only the top-ranked results. This is a two-step process:
- Search: Use investor identification tools to find landlords and flippers near your property. Score them by recency, proximity, price match, and transaction frequency.
- Trace the top tier: Skip trace the top 50-100 investors based on their scores. These are the most likely buyers, and tracing only this segment saves money.
This approach works because not every investor near your property is a good match. Some bought years ago and may no longer be active. Some buy at price points that do not match your deal. Some are in different sub-markets. By filtering before tracing, you avoid paying to trace contacts who would never respond to your deal.
Efficiency example: A search returns 300 investors. With platforms that charge per trace, tracing all 300 at $0.10/trace costs $30. Tracing only the top 75 costs $7.50. With Deal Run, skip tracing is free and included on all paid plans, so the decision is about focus, not cost -- reaching out to 75 high-scoring investors is often more effective than blasting all 300.
Option 2: Skip trace before search (pre-built lists)
Some wholesalers build pre-traced buyer lists for their entire market. They pull every investor in their target zip codes, trace them all once, and then segment by area and criteria for each new deal.
This front-loaded approach makes sense when:
- You wholesale exclusively in a small, defined area (3-5 zip codes)
- You source deals frequently (2+ per month) in the same market
- You want to blast deals immediately when they come in, without waiting for trace results
- Your skip trace provider caches results, so re-using them costs nothing
The downside with per-trace providers is the upfront cost. Tracing 1,000 investors at $0.10/trace costs $100. If half of those contacts are not relevant to any deal you source, that $50 was wasted. With platforms like Deal Run where skip tracing is included free, the cost concern disappears -- but the time savings of having contacts ready to blast can still be worth the upfront effort for high-volume operators.
The hybrid approach
Most successful wholesalers use a hybrid. They maintain a pre-traced core list of their best buyers (repeat closers, VIPs, and high-activity investors in their primary area). For each new deal, they run an area-specific search to find additional investors they have not traced before, and skip trace only the highest-scoring new results.
Over time, the pre-traced core list grows as each deal search adds new contacts. After 6-12 months, you may find that 70-80% of your buyer search results are already in your cache, and you only need to trace 20-30% new contacts per deal. Your investor search platform should support this cached workflow automatically.
Timing considerations
If you need to blast a deal today, you need contacts today. Skip trace results from modern API-based providers return in seconds to minutes. Batch results for 100-500 records typically come back within 5-15 minutes. This speed makes the "trace after search" approach practical even for time-sensitive deals.
If you are building your initial buyer list (before you have any deals), front-loading makes more sense. You want contacts ready to go when your first deal comes in. Spend the $50-100 on tracing your first 500-1,000 investors and start making introduction calls while you source your first contract.
What to trace and what to skip
Not every investor on your list needs a full skip trace. Save money by being selective:
- Always trace: Top-ranked investors by activity score, anyone with 3+ recent transactions, entities with properties in the same subdivision as your deal
- Trace selectively: Investors with 1-2 transactions in the broader area, entity-owned properties where you need to identify the individual
- Skip tracing optional: Investors whose last transaction was 2+ years ago, investors in a different price tier than your deal, institutional entities with public submission portals (just submit through their portal instead)
Use investor portfolio data to make these decisions before spending on skip traces.