Austin, TX · Member since 2015 · 223 posts · 185 votes
I landed my first couple of deals from skip tracing the returned letters from my mail campaigns. I used first class postage and received a good bit back, so my inner marketer spoke to me and said "track down these owners because nobody else is likely targeting them."
Once gathering a large quantity of these returned letters I set my plan in motion.I wanted to skip trace my lists in large quantities so I could better my chances of landing a deal. I cold called and resent mail to the correct addresses of these individuals and was able to land two deals with about 12k net profit on both transactions in the same month, not bad for a newbie!! This success led me to skip tracing my entire direct mail list and marketing on multiple channels. I haven't looked back since and have been apart of over 50 real estate transactions in my short 3 years of marketing and investing! Cheers to all, PM me any similar success stories.
Austin, TX · Member since 2015 · 223 posts · 185 votes
9y
@Account Closed Some resources you can use to locate correct addresses and phone numbers are findtheseller.com, TLO, Microbilt, or Spokeo. If you plan on prioritizing your list and going after the low hanging fruit, then I would use findtheseller.com. This can get very pricy because they charge like $6 per search OUCH; however, it's a quick fix and they have a quick turnaround time. Spokeo is as about good as White Pages, but I would use them for phone numbers rather than correct addresses because they'll likely be wrong. Microbilt was the first tool I used, and it was spotty with numbers but typically gave me correct addresses. It costs about $50 per month and is good if you are doing around 20 searches per month. You'll need to contact them and go through the process of getting an account, which takes roughly 2 weeks. Lastly, if you plan on doing this consistently then I would seriously consider TLO. I've had great experience with it, and it costs roughly $250 monthly for 3600 searches annually. I've found that I get 1 out of 25 numbers are incorrect, which is roughly 90% accuracy rate on a 1000-lead list. You need to go through the process of getting an account, like Microbilt. TLO will take you about a month to get but well worth it if you do plan on making skip tracing returned letters part of your business model. I would just weigh your options and see what fits your needs. I've skip traced tens of thousands of leads so I can answer any specific questions you have. Just ask away!
Lender · Omaha, NE · Member since 2008 · 1k+ posts · 1k+ votes
9y
@Ethan Summers, so are you able to provide this service for other investors? It sounds like you primarily do this for your own business, but do you ever do skip tracing for a fee? I do mailers (although not as consistently as I should) and get returned mail back regularly. I looked into TLO, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of the setup since I don't have crazy mailing volume. Not sure if it's what you want to do (or if it's even possible/feasible), but I wouldn't mind paying another investor do do some skip tracing for me for a fee so that I wouldn't have to go through the pain/brain damage of getting setup with an account somewhere...