Batch Skip Tracing for Real Estate Investing
By GoForClose teamFirst published Updated 4 min readBatch skip tracing finds owner phone numbers, emails and mailing addresses for a whole list at once, which is faster and cheaper than looking them up one by one. Its weakness is accuracy: you pay for matches, not correct numbers, so the quality of the provider decides whether it pays off.
How do you find leads with little-to-no information? The old school method was sending direct mail or hiring someone to manually find the phone numbers of the owners of certain properties. Times have changed, and there’s a faster, more efficient way to find information to zero in on motivated sellers: Batch Skip Tracing.
Batch Skip Tracing
Real estate investors and wholesalers use skip tracing to locate the owner of a property that can be a good investment opportunity. Batch skip tracing (or bulk skip tracing), to put it simply, is when you take a high volume of contacts and skip trace them all at once. You probably heard that real estate investing is a numbers game, so the more the merrier.
But it isn’t just about how many properties you can get info on, but also how accurate the information is you find for each. Imagine the benefits of finding verified contact information for an extended list of property owners simultaneously, broken down into different types, from mobile to landline numbers, to email and mailing addresses (if different from the targeted property).
Let’s go over the advantages of batch skip tracing, some disadvantages, and how to make it work for your Real Estate Investing or Wholesaling business.
Advantages of Batch Skip Tracing
Skip tracing is an essential step to find motivated homeowners, gauge their situation to sell, and be able to reach them. But let’s break it down: why do real estate investors and wholesalers need multi-tiered batch skip tracing?
Speed
Batch skip tracing is the fastest way to reach a high volume of contacts and gather data on motivated seller leads by providing you multiple means of communication. Most skip tracing is done by technology, which means you can get the information almost instantaneously.
Some real estate investors try to avoid using skip tracing by applying the old school direct mail tactic. However, this marketing tactic works better if you personalize it with the owner’s name. Plus, sending postcards may mean you are reaching the residents, if the property is occupied, but not necessarily the owner. It simply does not work if you’re targeting landlords. But skip tracing provides information about the owners specifically, including their mailing address, if the property you want is a secondary property.
Cost
How much does skip tracing cost? It depends. Manual skip tracing is usually more expensive, and services vary from single to multi-tiered. In 2021, most that used technology started at $0.02 per hit and, depending on who you used, you might also pay per data type, depending on what you wanted (i.e., seller names, phone numbers, primary mailing addresses, emails, and [sometimes] motivation/situation details).
Better ROI
Time for a disclaimer: batch skip tracing provides better ROI if and only IF you get quality skip tracing. If you have high accuracy matches, you reduce marketing costs, and you can possibly reach homeowners before other investors. But skip tracing with low quality matches, even with a high match rate, will result in loss of time, money, and potential deals.
Follow Up
The money is in the follow-up and having multiple channels to communicate gives you an advantage, in particular if the seller is not quite ready yet. Since skip tracing gives you more than phone numbers (it often gives you email addresses too), you can set up a drip campaign to follow up and nurture leads till they are ready to sell.
List Stacking
Skip tracing can provide more information than just contact information. Popular resources, like PropStream or ListSource, are used by many investors, which means a lot of competition in your market, and when you pull from several lists the data is often fragmented and has potential duplicates. You’ll still need to aggregate the data.
An effective and efficient skip tracing provider also offers list stacking, which essentially means they cross-reference the lists, preventing duplicate contacts, and include all the details about the lead’s situation (e.g., vacancies, code violations, water shutoffs, pre-foreclosures, etc.) under one contact, so you know they’re motivated to sell, and you can tailor your offer accordingly.
Bonus
In addition to giving you verified numbers, mail and email addresses, and situation details, skip tracing can often tell you if leads have more than one property. So even if they’re not willing to sell the one you were foremost interested in, they may sell you another.
The Single Disadvantage of Skip Tracing
Not All Skip Tracing is Created Equally: Risk of Data Inaccuracy
Different skip tracing providers have different accuracy rates. Keep in mind that you pay per hit or match, and sometimes (also) per data append, but not for accuracy.
Accuracy verification is an essential step, but for many real estate investors and wholesalers, this happens when they are already trying to communicate with the leads through various means.
Whatever the reason, skip tracing will not get the data right every single time. BUT, if it gets it right more times than it does wrong, it can still be considered a good batch skip tracing provider.
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