Is Skip Tracing really the problem, or is it what you do next?

[Chris Arnold]

I keep seeing people blame skip tracing when outbound campaigns underperform, and sometimes that’s fair.

But I’m starting to think the bigger issue is what happens after the skip trace comes back.

A provider may return 3, 4, or 5 phone numbers for an owner, but that doesn’t mean the data is actually useful yet.

The real questions are:

• Is this the right owner?
• Is the owner match current?
• Are the top numbers actually tied to that person?
• Is the property individually owned or buried behind an LLC/trust?
• Which number should the caller try first?
• Which records should be worked first at all?

A raw skip trace file can look complete but still waste a ton of caller time if there’s no confidence or priority layer behind it.

Curious how others handle this:

Once your skip trace comes back, do your callers just work the file as-is, or do you have a process for cleaning/ranking the records before outreach starts?