What is Skip Tracing in Real Estate?

Skip tracing is the process of finding contact information for a person or entity using public records, data aggregation services, and proprietary databases. In real estate investing, skip tracing is used to find phone numbers, email addresses, and personal details for property owners -- especially owners who may be difficult to reach through normal channels. The term originates from debt collection, where a "skip" is someone who has "skipped" town or is otherwise hard to locate.

For wholesalers, skip tracing serves two primary purposes. On the acquisition side, it helps you contact motivated sellers -- absentee owners, pre-foreclosure owners, or inherited property owners who may not respond to mailers. On the disposition side, skip tracing helps you find contact information for active investors who own properties in your area. If you can see from public records that someone recently bought and flipped a house two blocks from your deal, skip tracing tells you how to reach them.

How skip tracing works

Skip tracing services aggregate data from dozens of sources to build profiles on individuals and entities. When you submit a property address or owner name, the service searches across:

• Public records: County property records, deed recordings, UCC filings, court records, voter registration, and vehicle registration databases.
• Utility and telecom records: Phone number databases maintained by carriers and data aggregators. These include landlines, mobile phones, and VoIP numbers.
• Consumer data: Credit header data (non-credit information from credit bureau files), marketing databases, and change-of-address records.
• Business records: Secretary of state filings, registered agent databases, and business license records. This is how LLC owners are identified.
• Social and online data: Email addresses associated with social media profiles, domain registrations, and online accounts.

The service cross-references all of these sources, applies matching algorithms to link records to the same individual, and returns the most current contact information available. A typical skip trace result includes: full name, phone numbers (often 2-4, ranked by reliability), email addresses, current mailing address, age, and associated entities.

LLC entity resolution

A significant percentage of investment properties are owned by LLCs, trusts, or other corporate entities rather than individuals. County records might show the owner as "ABC Properties LLC" with a registered agent address that's a law office. Skip tracing resolves these entities to the actual humans behind them.

The process involves searching secretary of state filings for the LLC's registered members or managers, then tracing those individuals through the same consumer databases used for individual lookups. A good skip trace service can resolve most domestic LLCs to an individual with phone and email contact information.

Entity resolution is particularly important for disposition. Many of the most active cash buyers in any market operate through LLCs. When you identify a flipper from property records, the owner on file is usually an LLC name. Without skip tracing, that LLC is just a name on a deed. With skip tracing, it's a person with a phone number who you can call about your deal.

What you get back from a skip trace

A typical skip trace result includes:

• Full name: First, middle, last, and any known aliases.
• Phone numbers: Usually 2-5 numbers ranked by type (mobile, landline, VoIP) and recency. Mobile numbers are the most valuable for outreach.
• Email addresses: Personal and business email addresses associated with the individual.
• Mailing address: Current mailing address, which may differ from the property address for absentee owners.
• Demographics: Age, gender, and sometimes household composition.
• Associated people: Relatives, business partners, or co-owners linked to the same records.
• Phone line type: Whether a number is a mobile, landline, or VoIP line. This matters for SMS outreach (you can text mobile numbers, not landlines).

Cost per skip trace

Skip tracing costs vary significantly by provider, volume, and data depth:

The cost difference between a $0.05 trace and a $0.15 trace may seem small, but at volume it adds up fast. If you're tracing 200-500 investors per deal, that's $10-$75 per deal at the low end. Over a year with 30+ deals, skip tracing alone can cost $300-$2,250. This is why platforms that include skip tracing in their subscription (like Deal Run) can save hundreds or thousands per year compared to pay-per-trace models.

Skip tracing for buyer identification

The most powerful application of skip tracing in wholesaling is combining it with buyer identification. The workflow looks like this:

1. Identify active investors from property records. Search for absentee owners (landlords) and recent flippers (short hold period sales) within a radius of your subject property. This gives you a list of people who are actively investing in properties similar to yours.
2. Skip trace the list to get phone numbers and email addresses. Now you have a targeted list of active investors with contact information.
3. Send your deal package via email and/or SMS. Because the list is targeted (these people have already bought properties like yours, in the same area, recently), the response rate is dramatically higher than blasting a generic buyer list.

This is exactly how Deal Run's buyer identification works. You enter a property address, the system identifies landlords and flippers within the radius, skip traces them automatically, and ranks them by a Investor Score that factors in proximity, recency, price match, and activity level. The result is a ready-to-contact buyer list built fresh for each deal.

TCPA compliance and skip tracing

If you're using skip trace results for phone or SMS outreach, you need to be aware of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). The TCPA regulates unsolicited calls and texts to mobile phones. Violations can result in penalties of $500-$1,500 per call or text.

Key compliance requirements:

• Check the National Do Not Call (DNC) Registry before calling.
• Maintain your own internal DNC list and honor opt-out requests immediately.
• Screen for known TCPA litigators -- individuals who file lawsuits against callers for a living.
• For SMS, ensure the recipient has a mobile number (not a landline) and consider using one-to-one messaging rather than automated mass texting.

Deal Run includes DNC checking and TCPA litigator screening as part of the skip trace workflow, so you can see compliance flags before you reach out.

Related

• What is a Cash Buyer in Real Estate?
• What is Real Estate Disposition?
• Skip Tracing Guide for Real Estate Investors
• How Skip Tracing Works in Deal Run