How to Skip Trace Property Owners: The Complete Guide

Skip tracing is the process of finding contact information—phone numbers, email addresses, and mailing addresses—for property owners. The term comes from "skipping town," originally used by debt collectors to find people who had moved. Real estate investors use skip tracing to contact property owners directly, bypassing traditional listings to find off-market deals.

The best deals are off-market. Properties on the MLS have competition from every buyer in town. Skip tracing lets you reach owners directly—before they list. Whether you're wholesaling, flipping, or building a rental portfolio, direct-to-seller marketing starts with finding owner contact info.

You can find some owner information for free, though accuracy varies. TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch aggregate public records. County assessor websites show owner names and mailing addresses. Social media searches on Facebook and LinkedIn can reveal contact info. However, free methods have major limitations: low accuracy (often 50% or less), time-consuming manual lookups, and no phone type identification.

Professional skip tracing services aggregate data from credit bureaus, utility records, and multiple databases to achieve 85-95%+ accuracy. Key factors when choosing a service: hit rate (percentage of successful traces), data freshness, phone type ID (mobile vs. landline), litigator scrubbing, and pricing model (per record vs. per hit).

Start with your highest-priority leads to maximize ROI. Scrub for litigators before calling—TCPA lawsuits can cost $500-$1,500 per call. Verify phone types: mobile numbers are better for texting, landlines for cold calls. Skip trace in batches to reduce costs. Track which data sources yield the best contact rates.

FlipMantis skip tracing uses multi-source data verification to achieve 95%+ hit rates. Upload a list or skip trace individual properties with one click. Results include phone numbers (with mobile/landline identification), emails, mailing addresses, and litigator flags. Pay only for successful traces, and data flows directly into your dialer and CRM.