Making contact with potential sellers or clients is a core activity for real estate agents and their support staff. Much of an agent’s time and promotional budget goes to advertising, networking, open houses, and other activities aimed specifically at making contacts that can yield leads, listings or sales.
Yet not all potential sellers or clients can be reached through those means. Motivated agents can still find them, but doing so requires creativity and the use of unconventional tools and techniques. Some of those tools are borrowed from the skip tracing industry, usually used by collections and law enforcement agencies. It’s slightly more challenging to skip trace in real estate, but the rewards can be significant.
This article will explore the essence of skip tracking, underscore its pivotal role for real estate agents and realtors, and reveal why Spokeo For Business is the premier skip tracing solution for real estate professionals.
What is Skip Tracing in Real Estate?
The term skip tracing derives from the slang phrase “skip town,” meaning that a debtor or fugitive is on the run. Skip tracing stands as an investigative method designed to uncover the whereabouts, contact details, or assets of hard-to-locate individuals, proving indispensable in the real estate sector for identifying elusive prospects or property owners.
While the owner of a given property may indeed be on the run or incarcerated, typical reasons to skip trace in real estate are more prosaic. For example:
- Property owners in highly-desirable areas may be barraged with calls from agents, and take measures to actively avoid contact.
- A property’s ownership may be murky because of a tangled inheritance, or because it’s owned by a trust or LLC and its principals’ identities are obscure.
- Agents may receive referrals with incomplete or no contact information beyond a name, or incorrectly note the name or telephone number of a contact made during an open house or other interaction.
It’s sometimes possible to resolve those situations through simple internet searches, but those surface-level searches are often unreliable, time-consuming, and offer a relatively low success rate. Skip tracing, however, relies on a diverse array of data sources, from public records, such as court, property, and tax documents, to the vast expanse of social media, offering a glimpse into personal and professional lives of individuals, alongside private databases that provide in-depth information on location history and financial backgrounds.
Utilizing more powerful investigative methods and tools learned from the skip tracing industry can improve agents’ likelihood of success, and with it their return on the time and money invested. These methods include more creative and comprehensive use of public sources, such as social media, as well as paid tools including specialized databases.
Limitations of Skip Tracing for Real Estate
There are plenty of extremely powerful skip tracing tools available on the market today. However, due to the regulated nature of the data they provide, most skip tracing tools necessitate permissible use cases. Typically, the data provided by skip tracing tools is sensitive personal information that’s protected by law, and only available to third parties under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), for example. Because much of the data available through those services is derived from regulated data, it is also inaccessible to agents even if it can be replicated from unregulated sources.
For more information about navigating the world of regulated and unregulated data for prospecting in real estate, check out Spokeo’s guide to Navigating Data in Real Estate.
This is where Spokeo for Business offers a distinct advantage for real estate professionals. It does not require real estate agents to demonstrate permissible use for skip tracing prospects because its scope is limited to publicly available, non-regulated data, providing a streamlined approach to locating elusive clients or property owners. This flexibility is pivotal, as it allows agents to conduct their searches without the stringent prerequisites that might limit the utility of other services.
However, it’s essential for agents to remain mindful of ethical considerations and adhere to best practices in data usage, ensuring their activities are conducted with respect and due diligence.
Spokeo for Business is Your Best Source of Unregulated Data
Spokeo for Business stands out by offering comprehensive insights within a framework that is optimal for the real estate sector.
Spokeo’s data is aggregated from billions of publicly available records and over 5,000 individual data sources, including property tax and court records, databases from all levels of government, social media accounts, and public datacollected by private partners. All of that data (and much more) is available through Spokeo’s simple, intuitive search interface, within seconds.
Using Spokeo for Skip Tracing in Real Estate
Whatever partial data you have at your disposal – a name, a phone number, an address, an email, or even an online username – a simple Spokeo search will help you fill in the missing pieces. The information returned by that initial search will vary, based on what’s available and depending on the individual, but will typically include some combination of:
- A list of people with the same name, and their salient personal details, if the name you’ve searched matches more than one individual. In most cases you’ll quickly determine which of those possible matches is the correct person.
- Additional telephone numbers associated with the name, address, email or telephone number you’ve searched, including guidance on their recency and likelihood of being a currently-active number.
- The individual’s most recent home address, a comprehensive location history, and property ownership records.
- Current employment data.
- Estimated value of properties known to be owned by the search subject.
- The individual’s criminal history, if applicable (in some cases, a property’s difficult-to-find owner may be incarcerated).
- Contact information for others who may be related to the subject of your search.
- Usernames for your search subject spanning over 120 apps and online platforms, including all major and many minor social media apps and sites.
The latter is among the most powerful tools at your disposal. Spokeo launched originally as a social-media aggregator, and still offers unparalleled insight into your search subject’s online life.
Often the results of a single search, delivered within seconds, will provide all the data needed to successfully make contact. If not, using information from the initial results to craft additional searches will typically provide any still-missing data. Depending on the results received, agents might then (as long as done ethically and in a legally-compliant manner, especially related to telephone and online/email solicitations):
- Reach out directly to the subject, using newly-acquired alternative contact information.
- Review the subject’s public social media posts, and those of friends and acquaintances, either to establish the subject’s location and/or gauge the best methods for making contact.
- Reach out to the subject’s personal connections, directly or through social media, to appeal for assistance in making contact.
- Draw on the financial and property records information in the search results to assess the subject’s potential motivations for buying or selling.
For those agents or agencies operating in a team setting, with multiple agents or staff performing searches, Spokeo For Business’ streamlined dashboard allows administrators to easily oversee and monitor their team’s search history, add and remove team members, and view saved reports.
Aside from the innate efficiency gains, this enables administrators to gauge their usage and (if necessary) change their subscription level to match their actual needs. Administrators can also hold individual agents or staffers accountable for searches that may indicate unethical or inappropriate use of Spokeo’s powerful data tools.
Skip Trace in Real Estate with Spokeo for Business
Spokeo For Business provides real estate professionals at any career stage with a competitive advantage. The product’s user-centric design ensures that even tech-averse agents and staffers can use it with little to no training, but should training be required it’s available as part of Spokeo’s onboarding process.
Spokeo For Business is a safe choice for real estate professionals due to its offering of publicly available information. To be clear, it is still possible for individual agents to use their search results in ways that are unethical or potentially illegal; it remains the responsibility of agents and agencies to familiarize themselves, and remain in compliance with, any laws applicable in the jurisdictions where they operate.
Ultimately, a hands-on trial is the best and most reliable way to assess the potential of a new tool. Ambitious agents and growth-minded agencies can arrange a demonstration of Spokeo For Business, or a trial of the product, by reaching out to our team through the contact form at the bottom of this page.
Fred Decker is a prolific freelance writer based in Atlantic Canada, with articles appearing in print and online since 2007. He writes primarily on technology, personal finance, and food and foodservice, drawing on previous careers in those industries. He was educated at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Nova Scotia Community College, and the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology.
Disclaimer: The information provided in this article does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content, and materials available are for general informational purposes only. Spokeo is not a consumer reporting agency as defined by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). Do not use this site to make decisions about credit, employment, tenant screening, or any purpose covered by the FCRA.
Sources
Squire Patton Boggs: Overview of Privacy and Data Protection Laws: United States
National Association of Realtors: FTC Issues New Requirements for Non-Banking Financial Institutions
US Federal Trade Commission: Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
Squire Patton Boggs: Overview of Privacy and Data Protection Laws: United StatesUS Federal Trade Commission: Fair Credit Reporting Act