Skip Tracing for Real Estate Wholesalers
Find motivated sellers other investors cannot reach
Skip tracing is the process of locating contact information for property owners whose current address or phone number is unknown. For wholesalers, it is the bridge between a list of distressed properties and a conversation with the person who owns them.
What is skip tracing?
The term "skip" refers to someone who has "skipped out" — moved without leaving a forwarding address. Skip tracing is the investigative process of finding where that person went. Originally used by debt collectors and bail bondsmen, real estate investors adopted the technique to locate absentee landlords, pre-foreclosure owners, and out-of-state heirs who may not be aware that their property is a candidate for a wholesale deal.
For wholesalers, the value is access to off-market sellers. An owner who is behind on taxes, going through probate, or managing a rental from out of state is not going to list on the MLS. The only way to reach them is to find their current contact information, and skip tracing is how you do it.
A skip trace return typically includes current and historical phone numbers, email addresses, current mailing address, and sometimes known relatives or associates. That data feeds directly into your calling, texting, or direct mail campaigns.
What to look for in a skip tracing service
The percentage of records that return a match. Higher hit rates mean fewer cold lists — quality services consistently return phone numbers and emails for most of your contacts.
Services pull from different data aggregators, credit bureaus, and public records. More and fresher sources translate directly into more accurate contact information.
Some services charge per record, others sell monthly bundles or subscriptions. Your deal volume and list size should drive which model is cheaper over time.
Batch processing lets you upload a CSV and get results for thousands of records at once. Single lookups are useful for one-off research but rarely practical at scale.
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Browse Skip Tracing ToolsHow wholesalers use skip tracing
Pull a distressed or absentee owner list from your county or a list provider.
Upload the list as a CSV to your skip tracing service.
Receive matched records with phone numbers, emails, and known relatives.
Work through the list by cold call, text, or direct mail campaign.
Set an appointment with a motivated seller and move to offer.
Common questions
Yes, when done for legitimate business purposes. Reputable skip tracing services compile information from public records and licensed data providers. You are responsible for following applicable telemarketing rules, Do Not Call requirements, and any state-specific regulations when you contact people.
Quality skip tracing services typically return phone or email matches for 50 to 85 percent of records. Hit rate varies by the age and cleanliness of your input list — fresher lists with accurate property addresses tend to produce higher match rates.
Yes. Most skip tracing platforms accept CSV uploads so you can process hundreds or thousands of records in a single run. Results are usually returned within minutes to a few hours depending on list size.
Pricing varies by provider and volume. Per-record costs typically range from $0.05 to $0.25. Some services offer monthly subscriptions with bundled credits that reduce the effective per-record cost for high-volume users.
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