6 Real Estate Skip Tracing Techniques

Skip tracing is essential for any wholesaler that is looking to contact off-market leads. In this video, I cover 6 skip tracing techniques in real estate to find home owner contact information.

Transcription

Ariel Herrera 0:00

Hey everyone, today I'm going to be covering six techniques that you could use for skip tracing in real estate. This could be useful if you're a wholesaler or even a real estate agent, when you're looking to acquire new leads, and want to have that ability to contact those leads correctly. My name is Ariel Herrera, the analytics area channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. Big geek about real estate data. And notice there's a huge gap of understanding all the resources and tools available in the wholesaling space. So what I'm going to be doing over the next several weeks is releasing videos every Monday to give you more tips around that space. This is the kind of content that you enjoy them, please subscribe, so you get the latest of it. Alright, let's get started. In my journey to figure out what is the best skip tracing tool out there, I came across this amazing blog called the wholesaler toolbox. And in particular, this one page called Real Estate skip tracing tactics provided by someone named David. And this is a complete overview of how to do skip tracing for free. And also, if you want to go to more advanced techniques how to do that. So I'm going to doing is splitting this video into two parts. So for the one I'm going to be going over this blog, which I have in the notes as well if you want to follow along. And secondly, I'm going to walk through an actual example of how we would use some of these tools that David mentions. And David, if you want to learn a little bit more about him, he's the guy behind the wholesalers toolbox. Hopefully we get him on this channel. At some point, he does have his own YouTube channel as well, and provides a lot of insight in the wholesaling space in terms of using tools, contracts and evaluating deals as well. For this purpose, we're going to focus specifically on a skip tracing. So what is skip tracing? Say, if you're looking to find an owner of a vacant property, how do you know what the owners contact information is, from the public records, you could probably get their name, but that's not going to be enough, you need a way to contact them, whether that's email, cell phones, social media, etc. And these are some points that David touches on. So let's get to the first tactic here, which is finding the owner's name. If you're doing this on a low cost basis, and you're trying to do most of your wholesaling and list building for free, then one of the ways that you'd be able to find homeowners names is by going to the county websites, and then typing in their name. So for example, in Tampa, the county is Hillsborough County, so I would look up Hillsborough County, the name of the homeowner, as well as sorry, the address of the homeowner and then get the name there after. Or you could also use tools like prop stream, which I use that provides the information for you already, which makes it a little bit more scalable. So number two for skip tracing is just a people search. So there's a TON TON of free people searches available. And David lists them all here. It's about 25, sorry, 20, which is pretty expensive. But his favorite, which I love that he actually saves out here is fast people search which we're going to go through in the example at the end, fast people search allows you to enter in the person, state city zip code, as well, you could try to research people backwards by getting the phone number or address to and this is completely free. However, they do not have an API as of yet, which does make it a little bit manual having to answer it. Then step number three is using social media networks. So say for able to find the person and you want to wait to contact them maybe their phone, they're on the Do Not Call list, well, then how are you going to be able to get in touch with him? One way, sending mailers but maybe they don't live in that address anymore. But another alternative is finding them on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. I definitely want to try the LinkedIn one. I'm a little bit wary if there's if I get pushback on it how that could. Well, cons could happen. But I'm interested to see if any of you have tried social media networks if you find that to be a little bit more successful than just the typical call or texting. Next, skip tracing find the owner by just doing a good old Google Search, which you could actually automate with Python for free, since Python does have a library with Google search, and then you could just quickly query or something like a list of queries for each person name and address and then get the top URL. So that's one way that you could try to automate step

four. Step number five, advanced skip tracing tools. So David does mention that if you want to go to the next level of super Intel detective work of finding people Intel tech mix.com is a way to get more information on that. However, for these purposes, I really think we shouldn't bogged down too much on getting everything exact in a manual fashion, at least, we should try to understand what tools are available currently, how they allow us to scale and what their prices are, as well. And number six, offline skip tracing techniques, I thought these were pretty clever. I've heard some of them before listening to podcasts. But there's three in particular here that are mentioned in the blog. So one sending a letter to the homeowner. And if they're no longer in the actual home, so maybe it's a vacant homeowner, what happens is if their mail is voted, which is the case of all my mail for properties, I house hacked, it's forwarded to my current address, then USPS will come back to you and it would say what the homeowners actual current addresses. So this is a way to get in touch with them. Secondly, they say leave a note. And lastly, visit the neighbors which visit the neighbors does mention only do this if you've exhausted all other resources, because I could imagine that some neighbors may not be okay with this. Alright, so we have our six different techniques. Hopefully this can at least get you started understanding what skip tracing tools are available. But of course, if we put it into an example, it's going to be a lot easier to digest. Alright, so I'm going to go back into prop stream. And just to make sure that we understand the flow, there is this really neat resource that I've been referencing a lot. And it's called STEP BY STEP real estate wholesaling. So each of these steps, let's imagine where to start. The first is identifying laws and regulations in your market. So if you're looking to flip, sorry, wholesale in South Amboy, then you want to understand the regulations there. Next, set up an LLC, find undervalued homes that you could do if Prop stream driving for dollars, and it's a fine lead. Also, you could do with tools like prop stream, or just going to county foreclosure sites. And then this part right here is what we're interested in. So it's get in touch with the seller, ask essential questions about them in the property. So that first step, get in touch with the seller. This is what skip tracing does. So we go to prop streams now and say, if we want to focus on Old Bridge, New Jersey, we will then get a list of properties here, we can quickly just look at vacant properties. If that was our particular interest by clicking vacant, then we can go to filter, look at only residential properties. That way, we're not looking at things like land, but that might be your particular niche. So be aware of that. And in this case, maybe we're interested only in owners that have at least been in the property for three years, so that they may have more equity in their home. And we could also filter an equity as well. Let's say that the minimum equity should be at least 25%. Now we could back out of there. And we could see a list of homes especially familiar with this street since it's a very popular street that public transportation stops at and oh bridge. So it's a click at four Throckmorton lane. And we see here information quickly up top that it looks that the owner is likely vacant. And delay prop streams able to get this data also involves bringing in USPS information as well as probably other data sources. For this case, we want to be able to contact this person here. So their mailing care of name, so their first name, their last name, I'm going to copy their name, and I'm going to free people search, enter in their address. And then if I go back to prop stream, I can copy the zip code, enter the zip code, hit free people search. And instantly there's someone there

by the same name. And they also have information on past addresses potential phone numbers, as well as relatives which I've actually use this information on myself and some friends just to see how accurate it is. And fast people search is probably one of the most accurate in terms of a manual search, as well as white pages, which is pretty good. So in this case, our next step would be actually logging this in somewhere in some database spreadsheet or in the notes for Prop stream and then once I have a list of different potential homeowners I want to contact as well as their contact information. I can then quickly get their cell phone on Go through it. However, you can imagine this would be really tedious to do. Say if you have a list of 200 homeowners, I mean, this could probably take you a full day if not more. Therefore, it's really useful to also look into batch skip tracing tools. And I'm going to show you some of those in the next video, as well as pros and cons that I've seen and which ones have worked best in my market. So stay tuned and subscribe. Thanks