You’ve probably heard of skip tracing for real estate and have wondered, isn’t that the thing private investigators do to find fugitives?
Well, yes. But here’s the thing: skip tracing for real estate is fast becoming a popular and profitable process for real estate agents to generate leads. In a post-pandemic America, more and more residential and commercial spaces in cities are freeing up because people are moving back to their home states while companies are shifting to remote work.
However, because of the confusion that multiple lockdowns and quarantines have created for everyone, many of these property owners have fallen behind with their paperwork and now their properties can be considered abandon.
Fortunately, real estate companies and agents can use skip tracing to help reconnect these owners with their property and find a way to generate profit for everyone: the property owner can recover some of their initial investment, the realtor closes a sale, and the potential buyer is provided a revenue generating opportunity.
But is using a skip tracing service really worth it? Short answer: yes. Long answer, well:
Skip Tracing Generates A Variety Of Real Estate Leads
In 2021, there was a 21% increase in Zombie foreclosures across America, with a majority of them foreclosing on residential properties. That being said, there’s a wide variety of properties out there that have missing property owners that can be found by skip tracing software for real estate investors.
But before you think that these properties were abandoned for shady reasons, fear not: most of the properties were abandoned for completely legal, albeit unfortunate, reasons. Properties that have been vacant for 90 days may be reported vacant, especially if they have mail that’s been returned to sender. These types of properties may include, but not limited to:
- Absentee Homeowners: the biggest reason for abandoned homes, these properties are usually a person’s 3rd or 4th home investment and they either have no time to handle all of their investment properties, or they’ve simply forgotten about it.
- Tax delinquent properties: some property owners get behind on taxes and might abandon their properties because it’s an easy out.
- Corporate-owned Properties: when the pandemic hit, many companies chose to shift to a remote work scheme, leaving many of their properties to be abandoned.
Skip tracing can generate leads for properties of these types, and many more, especially if the skip tracing service that real estate investors use is able to draw out data from both public and private databases.
It’s One Of The Fastest Ways To Generate Leads
Seasoned real estate agents –especially the ones that plied their trade during the pre-internet, pre-smartphone era –know how hard it is to generate leads (think: Glengarry Glen Ross). In fact, traditionally, lead generation for real estate used to rely on more direct ways like direct mailing, networking, trawling around neighborhoods for ‘For Sale’ signs, and some good ol’ fashioned door-to door conversations.
Naturally, all of these take so much investment in terms of time and effort without providing that much success in terms of lead generation. With skip tracing services for real estate investors, you take out a lot of guesswork and leg work while increasing your chances of success. That’s because you’re targeting people that actually have a very good reason to sell. After all, abandoned properties won’t look good on anyone’s credit scores, so owners of abandoned property might be very amenable to the prospect of getting rid of their house or building.
There’s Great Value-For-Money To be Made With Skip Tracing
Here’s the thing about abandoned properties: if you’re lucky, these properties will have only been abandoned for less than a year, which means they probably haven’t seen a lot of weather damage and natural wear-and-tear. However, even if you find a property that’s been abandoned for decades, the cost-benefit of buying a property that has seen better days and selling it over to someone who can flip for pennies to the dollar means that skip tracing for abandoned properties might just be the greatest value-for-money processes a real estate agent can go for.
Yes, quality skip tracing can cost a fair bit, but the payoff is well worth the initial investment, especially since many of the abandoned properties in urban areas have great resale value now that cities are opening back up.
Need More Info? We Can Skip Trace It For You!
Best Skip Tracer is one of the leading service providers of skip tracing for real estate. With our tried, tested, and trusted network of high-quality data providers, we can provide a comprehensive list of leads for your real estate company. We offer scalable pricing for our services, meaning you only have to pay what you can afford. Visit our About Us and Pricing pages to learn more about how we can help you!