Real Estate Podcast

Episode 147: Skiptracing Your Leads

brrrr method david dodge discount property investor michael slane podcast real estate 101 real estate coaching real estate investing real estate investor real estate tips wholesaling wholesaling real estate Sep 22, 2022

Show Notes

In this episode, David and Mike talks about Skiptracing and other tools to find those property owners. You should locate those land owners because it is much better than pursuing deals everyone else is chasing. If you want to know what Skiptracing is then check this out.⁠

What is Skiptracing?

A skip trace is a detailed search of multiple data sources, not available to the general public, that will provide you with specific information to help you locate "lost" or hard to find property owners. 

Things that learn in this episode:

  • How Skiptracing works
  • Why you should Skiptracing?
  • Does Skiptracing help your businesss?

Episode Transcripts

David: Alright guys we are back! This is the Discount Property Investor podcast. I am your host David Dodge with my co-host Mike Slane. What's up, Mike?

Mike: Oh not a whole lot, just hiding out from the old Corona like we're doing these days.

David: Yeah buddy.

Mike: What you doing?

David: So we are playing around with some new software today, guys, I hope you enjoy it. It has some little cool things like sound effects, so we may be throwing something in there in the mix.

Mike: Oh boy!

David: I'm liking it.

Mike We are recording and playing around with some new stuff in the new studio, our updated studio we've got and it's kind of fun. So we geek out on this stuff and hopefully we won't annoy you guys too much with cool sound effects like you just heard from Dave.

David: That's right.

Mike: What are we talking about today, Dave? We are going to try and keep this one brief, right? So let's jump into the topic which we were going to cover, which was it?

David: Skiptracing. Absolutely, man. Skiptracing, you have to get people's phone numbers and e-mail addresses if you want to contact them, otherwise you can--.

Mike: This is what I love about the business.

David: You can send mail, but that's really the only thing you can do without their phone numbers, right?

Mike: That's what I'm saying, that's what I love about this business. I used to-- we used to-- when I started, I think you as well, it's only been a few years, but when we started it was like, we have to get a list of people, right? Got to get a list of people so I can mail them. That was pretty much where it ended.

David: Right.

Mike: Mail them and hopefully they called you. Now, it's a little bit more of an aggressive game, where you're skip tracing them, right So instead of just mailing them, you get to take on this whole other part of the business which is hunting more. You really get to go out and--.

David: Man, I was hoping to be able to back this up a little bit.

Mike: Pursue those leads more aggressively, get to go hunt for these leads. So let's talk about real quickly, what is skiptracing, Dave? What is it?

David: Skiptracing is awesome. It is a service that provides you with people's phone numbers, and their e-mail addresses, as well as more data, right? So whenever you are buying a list, sometimes that list will be limited to just names and addresses, and that's it. Also, if you are just trying to find a property that you don't even have on a list, you can get the address of that property. Typically you can get the owner's name pretty easily from the tax records. So that's something you don't have to skiptrace. In theory when you go searching for their information. You are in the process of skiptracing--.

Mike: Exactly, and what part are you getting? Like we said, before you had to at least find the address. So that's like baby first version of skip trace. You have a property, who owns it? Again, you can go to the county records and find that for yourself, try and find some info on them. If you doing that a hundred times, or a thousand times, it just becomes-- it's too time consuming for almost anybody. It's going to be cheaper to use a skiptrace service to go out and find that additional data on those people.

David: Absolutely.

Mike: Very neat to be able to work--.

David: Absolutely.

Mike: Where all of these services are readily available an inexpensive.

David: Absolutely.

Mike: Which is very cool.

David: Love it.

Mike: So yeah, that's pretty much it. It's finding information on people, skiptracing. Marketing directly to those people, that's what you need to start doing.

David: Yep. So whenever we do our skiptracing we do it in batch. Occasionally we will do one off skiptracing. It's a little bit more expensive to do one off skiptracing. We do all of our skiptracing through Batch Skiptrace. You can find a link to get a three cent discount. So we can drop the price for you if you're interested in skiptracing from twenty cents to 17 cents when you are doing your skiptracing, which will really add up over time if you are doing thousands and thousands of skiptracing. When we do it, we try to do at least a batch of two hundred, then from there we have phone numbers, we have additional information about a property, we have an owner's name, sometimes we will get the second owner of the property's name and phone numbers. Often times it will also give us some information about the property, what they may owe, if they have leans. It all depends on what you're looking for. But you can get all this information from skiptracing. Go ahead, Mike.

Mike: Dave said, a small batch would be like two hundred, that is a small batch. When we are trying to hit a neighborhood, or whatever it is--.

David: Typically I would say our average is anywhere between 3-5 thousand when we do our skips.

Mike: Right.

David: Two or three times a month. So we are doing quite a bit of them. So it is an investment. You are going to spend some money to get the data. The cool thing is, once you get the data, right? So you get all the phone numbers, you get all the e-mail addresses, there are systems which you can leverage that help get your marketing message out, and it is actually much cheaper than sending out direct mail. You might spend 17 cents for example on the phone number to get the number. But, to send them a text message or a phone call from cold call is essentially free, or you can also get systems and put those in place to help automate that too. Essentially--.

Mike: It's cheaper, exactly. Two hundred, two thousand, five thousand, whatever you're doing; as your business scales, there are certain tools that can help you scale it more efficiently, more effectively, yeah, very neat. Did we drop the link? You said we can get people three cents off--.

David: We can, go to DPIPodcast.com/Skiptracing, I think we also have Skiptrace.

Mike: DPIPodcast.com, there you can find our tool kit that has all of them down on there, the direct link though, DPIPodcast.com/Skiptrace-- they are not getting confused.

David: DPIPodcast.com/Skiptrace. There will be a link on there, use that link and it will give you guys three cents off. Also you basically become a lifetime customer with that discount once you use it once. Moving forward you should be able to keep using it. Otherwise, BatchSkiptrace.com and use code 'DPI'. That will be the code to also get that 17 cents skip. So we love doing Skiptracing, guys. Highly recommend that you look into skiptracing to send text messages, do your cold calls, get their phone numbers. We have even done e-mail campaigns in the past where we will e-mail people just saying, hey we are buying houses in the neighborhood, if you have any interest in selling yours let us know, we will come over and give you a free consultation on what it's worth.

Mike: I was just thinking about one of our bigger deals that we've done, the biggest deal we have ever done. If you go back and look for our episode, I think it's '$100'000 wholesale', do you remember the name?

David: Yeah.

Mike: Remember guys, why do we like skiptracing so much? It was one of our biggest deals we have ever done. We finally broke the five figures, the six figures on one single wholesale deal. $100'000 wholesale deal from a skiptrace. So that's why we kind of get jazzed up when we talk about it. That's why I get jazzed up about it, and remember how powerful it is.

David: We actually skiptraced that through the Deal Machine app--.

Mike: Did we really?

David: Yeah, got their information and sending postcards though them. But, if you are doing bulk, you can do it elsewhere. That's also a great resource to do some skiptracing. You're out and about and you don't want to be doing on off's. You can do it right then and there through the app in your car.

Mike: Again, we have links to that one up in the tool kit as well, guys. There is a lot of really neat tools. Again, like I said, awesome time to be wholesaling. It is easier than ever to do. Yeah so--.

David: Guys, check it out, DPIPodcast.com/Skiptrace. Get three cents off of each skip, you are doing it in bulk so you are bringing the price down to about 17 cents. It is the highest quality data, that is why we use it. You may be able to find some services out there that are claiming they can do it for 6-8 or even 10 cents. Trust me I have used them all, the data that comes back 10-20% of right data, whereas this comes back and it is 97% accurate.

Mike: That is a huge factor.

David: You are going to get the data you're paying for.

Mike: The data quality. We have mentioned this to people before and they can get it for way cheaper. It's like, oh okay, how many phone numbers did you get? How many are accurate?

David: Right.

Mike: I don't know, maybe one in ten. Again, save your time, save your money.

David: Why even spend the money if that's the case. That is just going to create more work for you down the road too when you are calling nine numbers that don't even connect you. Love that. Alright guys, thanks for listening, shorter episode today, but we definitely want to let you know what skiptracing is one of our favorite ways to go out and find motivated sellers. This is a strategy we like to call fishing-- sorry, hunting. I get confused, because we get all these numbers, we drop them into our dialer to do some cold calling or even our texting platform, and we will text each individual number, and let them know that we are here to buy houses. If they have something to sell, we are here to buy it.

Mike: Hey let's sign off with a goofy sound effect, what do you think?

David: Alright guys, we are signing off, until next time.



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