All Forum Posts by: Dennis S. Gelbart

Dennis,

Yeah, we’ve been deep in the skip tracing game for a while. My son and I used to do tax deed and mortgage foreclosure recovery, and we were running through over 1,000 traces a month. We tested a bunch of paid services and, honestly, found that some of the free ones like TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch were just as good for most cases.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t find a better paid option, but you have to ask yourself what you’re really paying for. If you need volume and speed, automation is key. My son Jack actually just wrote a Google Sheets script two days ago that skip traces 997 people in under 4 minutes. If you're doing high-volume targeting in a specific area, something custom like that could be a game-changer.

But if you want an off-the-shelf paid service, it depends on what you're prioritizing batch processing, accuracy, or deep data pulls. What’s your main use case?

Dennis,

Yeah, we’ve been deep in the skip tracing game for a while. My son and I used to do tax deed and mortgage foreclosure recovery, and we were running through over 1,000 traces a month. We tested a bunch of paid services and, honestly, found that some of the free ones like TruePeopleSearch and FastPeopleSearch were just as good for most cases.

Now, I’m not saying you can’t find a better paid option, but you have to ask yourself what you’re really paying for. If you need volume and speed, automation is key. My son Jack actually just wrote a Google Sheets script two days ago that skip traces 997 people in under 4 minutes. If you're doing high-volume targeting in a specific area, something custom like that could be a game-changer.

But if you want an off-the-shelf paid service, it depends on what you're prioritizing batch processing, accuracy, or deep data pulls. What’s your main use case?

It's pretty dangerous to start RE with money in your pocket. It makes you move faster than your learning curve.

RE is a great long term investment done right, but it takes time to learn the craft. I am a learning-it-from-the-ground-up guy.  Like swimming, you can't  really learn it ALL from a book, a lot of it is street smarts and hands-on experience. 

I would say it takes about 10 deals to graduate from rookie status. Ideally you handle acquisition, bank financing, all of the rehab (with contractors) and self manage for full first hand experience. 

This should not take that much money, keep the rest invested based on your existing experience until ready.