Real estate investing has become a very competitive business thanks to the many TV shows that make it appear to be a very simple and foolproof way to get rich quickly. And there are many investors who are now making a living working for themselves and mimicking the processes that they learned from these real estate shows. But the great real estate investors, the ones who are on the way to financial independence, know that it takes drive, dedication, and creativity to create a successful real estate investing career. These are the investors who are taking full advantage of skip tracing services because they understand the benefits of the process.
Because the business of real estate investing is competitive, investors are often forced to increase their initial offer to beat out another offer. This just tightens the budget and means there is less profit and less margin for error. But when an investor uses skip tracing to find a “missing” property owner, chances are that there will be no other offers on the table. This means that the investor can offer what he or she feels is fair and know that if the offer is accepted, there is money to be made.
What Is Skip Tracing in Real Estate?
Unlike other fields where tracing information is used to track down existing customers or seek out hard-to-locate individuals, skip tracing in real estate is usually used to find contact information for owners, especially when they do not live at the address that has piqued your interest. As a result, it tends to be fast and easy to automate, but it also needs to handle bulk requests.
How Real Estate Investors Can Use Skip Tracing
So, you might be asking yourself now, what does it take to skip trace real estate in your process? It’s a lot easier than you think, especially once you see how it streamlines your workflow.
- Build a list of distressed properties using map research tools, pre-foreclosure lists, and other sources of information about potentially motivated sellers
- Use tools like Batch Skip Tracing to submit bulk skip tracing orders on your entire lead list at once, paying for just the results you get
- Reach out and initiate contact with the information from your skip trace with tools like direct mail campaigns or call directly when you get phone numbers
- Work follow-up on any leads that come back as potentially motivated sellers
This process can be scaled so your team does the bulk lead generation and outreach work while you focus on closings, and it works just as well for sales agents as for investors seeking a potential acquisition for themselves. As you can see, it streamlines several stages of the lead generation process, especially if you have the right toolkit to make the most of your access to the best skip tracing service out there.
The labor involved in a bulk campaign that works your whole lead list is negligible on a per-lead basis, and it is an unobtrusive way of opening the conversation that leaves the ball in the potential seller’s court. Using that tool with skip tracing information allows you to stop driving for dollars and start doing everything from your office.
Value of Real Estate Skip Tracing
The most significant benefit to skip tracing is its ability to allow you to generate and work leads at a high volume. With the right team and task delegation processes, you can do orders of magnitude more outreach and follow-up than with older methods of lead generation like cold calling.
An additional benefit of using skip tracing and bulk tracing is that the process can provide much larger numbers of potential customers than just search the MLS or looking for houses that are on the market at a great price. It is not always about making a killing on a single property, making a reasonable margin on a large number of properties is always a great way to grow your business.
High Volume Lead Generation and Outreach
You can never control who will be interested in selling, and the number of conversions to closed sales are pretty similar from one well-honed operation to the next. The key to making your deals at volume is working those leads at a high volume, which is pretty easy when you can order contact information tracing on big batches of property owners at once. This is especially true when your follow-up is something that costs you almost no time at all on a per-lead basis.
Skip tracing is a much faster method of creating leads. Driving around town looking for signs that say for sale by owner takes up valuable time that could be better spent working with clients. Let the skip tracers crank out lists of potential clients and let your agents begin making calls to qualify the best leads for you to focus on. And know that you will only be paying a skip tracer for good numbers that will actually get you in contact with property owners.
Focus Your Skills on Closing Deals
When the calls roll in from interested parties, you can focus your work on making the deal happen. In the time you used to spend getting just a few callbacks, you can line yourself up with enough work to stay busy for a week or more. It all depends on whether you have the team to back you up and the additional software tools to make the most of your skip tracing information.
No matter what you are working with, access to cost-effective skip tracing tools means you get the chance to do more work with less labor investment, allowing you to spend more time closing. That’s a good deal for any real estate professional, from sales agents to wholesalers and investors.
Understanding the financial benefits of using skip tracing is a critical step in transitioning from just another real estate investor to one of the greatest real estate investors in the business.
