What’s your process for working through skip-traced lists?

Question

I’ve
been digging into the outbound side of real estate investing
lately—specifically how people are working through lead lists.

One
thing I keep noticing is that most skip tracing just returns data… but doesn’t
really help answer the bigger question:

Who should you actually call first?

From
what I’ve seen, a lot of teams end up dialing straight down a list without much
prioritization, even though some leads are clearly better than others (based on
things like vacancy, equity, ownership, etc.).

I’ve
been working on a way to take a standard property list and layer in:

• contactability (how reachable
     someone actually is)
• motivation signals (equity,
     absentee, distress, etc.)
• and a simple “call-first”
     ranking

The
goal is just to turn a raw list into something more actionable for whoever is
doing the calling.

Curious
how others are handling this right now—

Are
you guys prioritizing your lists in any structured way, or mostly just working
through them top to bottom?

Chris Arnold · Answer

Hi Jay...

That’s a great breakdown—and I like the point about it being a moving target. What works for a few months definitely starts to fade once competition catches up.

Filtering out LLCs and separating out-of-state owners makes a lot of sense too—that’s a clean way to improve list quality without overcomplicating things.

I agree it’s still a numbers game—but what I’ve been seeing is the investors who can squeeze a bit more efficiency out of those numbers tend to stay ahead longer. Even small improvements in who you contact first can have a pretty big impact on response rate and deal flow over time.

That’s the piece I’ve been digging into—just trying to make that prioritization a bit more dynamic so it can adjust as response patterns shift.

Curious—when you were running those campaigns, did you notice certain segments consistently outperforming others, or did it vary quite a bit over time?

Jay Toluganti · Answer

When I was doing land wholesaling, i used to get the list with both retail sellers and corporate sellers. But the quality of retail sellers is high. So, I used to filterout on names like LLC, INC, LP etc. That would remove around quater of the list. Then I would separate out of state vs in state leads. I would contact out of stare sellers in PST timezone. I did the land wholesalimg for three years. The response rate went down over time because of competition. So, its a moving goal post situation sometimes. Better to keep some processing time for the list regularly and see whats working. End of the day, wholesaling is a nunbers game.