You Can’t Call People Without Their Phone Numbers (Obviously)

Skip tracing is one of those terms that sounds way more mysterious than it actually is. It’s not espionage. It’s not hacking. It’s essentially the process of finding current contact information — phone numbers, email addresses, and sometimes mailing addresses — for people who aren’t easy to reach through normal channels.

In real estate investing, skip tracing is how you go from “I know this person owns a property” to “I have their cell phone number and can call them.”

If you’re doing any kind of outbound lead generation — cold calling, texting, or even direct mail — skip tracing is the foundation everything else is built on. Get it wrong, and you’re throwing money at wrong numbers and dead ends.

Here’s everything you need to know.

How Skip Tracing Actually Works

The term “skip tracing” originally comes from the debt collection industry. When a debtor would “skip” town, collectors would “trace” them — hence the name. In real estate, nobody’s skipping town (usually), but the concept is the same: finding contact information for property owners.

The process works like this:

  1. Start with what you know. You have a property address and an owner name, typically pulled from county tax records or a platform like PropStream.

  2. Cross-reference databases. Skip tracing providers maintain massive databases compiled from public records, credit bureaus, utility records, phone company registrations, social media profiles, and other data sources. They match the owner name and property address against these databases.

  3. Return contact info. You get back phone numbers (usually 2-5 per person), email addresses, and sometimes additional mailing addresses. The numbers are typically ranked by likelihood of being current and accurate.

  4. Dial and find out. You or your callers work through the returned numbers until you reach the actual property owner or determine the data is bad.

It’s not magic — it’s data aggregation and matching at scale.

Why Accuracy Matters More Than Price

Here’s where most investors get it wrong: they shop for skip tracing based solely on price per record. “Provider A charges $0.08 per record and Provider B charges $0.15 — easy choice, right?”

Wrong. Dead wrong.

If Provider A gives you 40% accuracy and Provider B gives you 65% accuracy, Provider B is dramatically cheaper on a per-contact basis.

Let’s do the math:

You skip trace 5,000 records.

Provider A ($0.08/record, 40% accuracy):

  • Cost: $400
  • Accurate records: 2,000
  • Cost per accurate contact: $0.20

Provider B ($0.15/record, 65% accuracy):

  • Cost: $750
  • Accurate records: 3,250
  • Cost per accurate contact: $0.23

Okay, the per-contact cost is similar. But here’s what the simple math misses:

Provider A’s extra 1,250 bad numbers cost you in other ways:

  • Wasted caller time dialing wrong numbers ($2-3 per bad dial × 3,000 bad numbers = $6,000-$9,000)
  • Caller morale destruction (nothing kills motivation like hearing “wrong number” all day)
  • Missed opportunities (1,250 people you literally cannot reach)

When you factor in the downstream costs, the “expensive” provider saves you thousands.

The Best Skip Tracing Providers for Real Estate

We’ve tested most of the major providers at Televista. Here’s our honest assessment as of 2022:

Batch Skip Tracing

Cost: $0.12-$0.15/record Accuracy: 60-70% Our take: Solid all-around provider. Good accuracy, reasonable pricing, and a clean interface. This is what we recommend for most investors starting out.

Skip Genie

Cost: $0.08-$0.10/record Accuracy: 50-60% Our take: Budget-friendly but you’ll feel the accuracy difference. Fine for supplementing other providers, not great as your primary source.

REI Skip

Cost: $0.10-$0.14/record Accuracy: 55-65% Our take: Middle of the road. Decent for absentee owner lists, less reliable for harder-to-trace demographics like probate leads.

PropStream Built-In Skip Tracing

Cost: $0.12/record (included with subscription) Accuracy: 55-65% Our take: Convenient if you’re already using PropStream for list pulling. Not the most accurate, but the integration saves time.

TLO / IDI (Professional Grade)

Cost: $0.25-$1.00+/record Accuracy: 75-85% Our take: The gold standard, but access is restricted to licensed professionals (PI, attorneys, certain financial professionals). If you can get access, the accuracy is unmatched.

The Multi-Provider Strategy

Here’s what smart investors (and agencies like us) do: we skip trace the same list through multiple providers and stack the results.

Why this works:

  • Different providers pull from different data sources
  • A number that Provider A misses might be in Provider B’s database
  • Having multiple numbers per owner dramatically increases your chance of reaching them
  • You can cross-validate — if two providers return the same number, it’s more likely accurate

How to stack:

  1. Run your list through your primary provider (e.g., Batch Skip Tracing)
  2. Take the records that returned zero results and run them through a second provider (e.g., REI Skip)
  3. For high-priority lists (pre-foreclosure, probate), run through all providers and compile the best numbers

At Televista, we use a multi-provider approach for every client campaign. It costs more upfront, but the hit rate improvement is dramatic — typically 70-80% overall accuracy versus 55-65% with a single source.

Skip Tracing for Specific List Types

Not all lists skip trace equally. Here’s what to expect:

Absentee Owners

Accuracy: 60-75% These are generally easier to trace because they have a mailing address on record that differs from the property address — that’s additional data for matching.

Pre-Foreclosure / Notice of Default

Accuracy: 50-65% Slightly harder. People in financial distress sometimes change phones or let bills lapse.

Probate

Accuracy: 40-55% Tough. You’re often trying to reach heirs, not the deceased owner. The heir’s name might not be clearly associated with the property yet. Expect to make more calls per contact.

Tax Delinquent

Accuracy: 55-65% Similar to pre-foreclosure. Financial distress can mean disconnected phones.

Code Violations

Accuracy: 50-60% Mixed bag. Some are investors who are easy to find, others are absentee owners who’ve abandoned the property.

Common Skip Tracing Mistakes

1. Only using one phone number per record. Most providers return multiple numbers. Don’t just call the first one and move on — work through all of them. The “best” number is wrong about 30-40% of the time.

2. Not appending landline vs. mobile indicators. Some providers flag whether a number is a landline or mobile. This matters for compliance — TCPA rules differ for landlines and mobile phones, and you generally can’t auto-dial mobile numbers without prior express consent.

3. Skip tracing once and never again. People change phone numbers. The data degrades over time. If you’re sitting on a list you skip traced six months ago, 15-20% of those numbers are now stale. Re-skip trace active lists every 60-90 days.

4. Not scrubbing against DNC lists. Skip tracing gives you phone numbers. It does NOT tell you whether those numbers are on the Do Not Call registry. You must scrub separately before dialing.

5. Ignoring email addresses. Skip tracing usually returns email addresses too. Most investors ignore them. But an email drip campaign running alongside a calling campaign can significantly boost response rates.

How Televista Uses Skip Tracing

When a client comes to Televista with a list, here’s our process:

  1. Clean the list — remove duplicates, standardize addresses, verify owner names against county records
  2. Multi-provider skip trace — run through 2-3 providers and stack results
  3. DNC scrub — remove all numbers on the National DNC registry and applicable state lists
  4. Mobile/landline classification — flag number types for compliance
  5. Priority scoring — rank leads based on number of valid contacts and list type
  6. Load into dialer — highest-priority leads get called first

This process adds 2-3 days before calling begins, but the campaign performance is dramatically better than raw skip trace data dumped into a dialer.

The Bottom Line

Skip tracing is not sexy. It’s not the exciting part of real estate investing. But it’s the boring foundation that everything else depends on. Bad data kills campaigns. Good data makes them.

Invest in quality skip tracing providers, use multiple sources, re-skip trace regularly, and always scrub for DNC compliance.

Or let us handle the data work entirely. At Televista, skip tracing and data management are baked into every campaign — no extra charge, no extra headache.

Have questions about skip tracing for your market? Reach out to the Televista team — we’ll walk you through our process.