Skip tracing is basically the process of locating a person whose whereabouts are unknown. This could be because they are hiding from debt, or from the law or because they have moved, changed their name or many other reasons. But in the world of real estate investing, skip tracing is used to locate specific types of people in most cases. Sometimes real estate investors are seeking buyers for their properties and other times, they are looking for a motivated seller. And in more rare instances, a real estate investor is looking for the owner of a specific property that he or she wants to make an offer on.
When you are looking for someone, even the most basic information can be the start of a lead to their new location. You might have an old address, a phone number or an email address. From there, you can begin to plug that information into free sites such as Google, or social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. It can greatly narrow down your search to have a least a city to include with the name for better results. There are also free people finder websites that you can use. Most of these will only give you very basic information for free and then you need to buy a subscription for more detailed info. Genealogy websites can also be useful and are often free for some information buy a membership will provide you access for a year of unlimited use in most cases.
As mentioned above, there are many sites that offer some free information but then require a membership or a payment to get more in-depth information. In addition, there are some sites that will only provide information after you have paid a fee or subscribed. The sites that offer a yearly subscription are the best if you are going to be doing a lot of searches and will be doing all of your own skip tracings.
The biggest secret is to learn the process and then work through all of your resources to locate the person or person’s that you want to find. Don’t give up after a fast search and throw away a potentially great deal. The harder a person is to find, the better the odds that you will have no competition when you make an offer on their property.
