I have spent $65.30 on skip tracing this year. That covered 691 addresses across my Puget Sound markets, and 646 of them came back with a phone number.
I lead with the price because most of what gets written about skip tracing is written by companies that sell it, and the number they want in your head is a monthly subscription. Mine is a rounding error, because I only pay for the part the county does not already give me.
Skip tracing is paying a data vendor to append current contact information, usually phone numbers and email addresses, to an address or a name you already have. It pulls from aggregated consumer data (utility hookups, credit header files, phone carrier records, public filings), so it can tell you things no public record will. What it cannot tell you is who owns the property. The county already publishes that, along with a mailing address that reaches the owner, for free.
That distinction is the whole post. Skip tracing is a phone-number tool wearing an owner-lookup costume, and the confusion costs people real money.
This is the last step of the owner identification workflow, which sits inside the broader guide to public records for real estate.
What actually happens when you run one
You submit an address, a name, or both. The vendor matches it against aggregated consumer databases and returns whatever it can associate with that record: a person, phone numbers ranked by confidence, email addresses, a current mailing address, sometimes relatives and a deceased flag.
Where that data comes from matters, because it explains the failure modes. It is assembled from credit header files, utility and telecom records, warranty cards, court filings, and marketing databases, then matched by fuzzy logic. Nobody verified any of it this morning. That is the same provenance problem behind every property data tool, which I broke down in where property data tools get their data.
Two consequences you should plan around:
- Confidence is a range. Vendors rank phones because they know some are wrong. A rank-one number is a good bet, and it is still a bet.
- The match is to an address. Nothing in that pipeline reads a deed or a title record. More on why that bites you in a minute.
What it costs, and what mine returned
I run mine through Tracerfy at 5 credits per hit, and credits cost $0.02, so a hit runs $0.10 and a miss is free. Here is what 691 address lookups bought me between May 27 and July 8, 2026:
| Result | Count | Share of the 691 submitted |
|---|---|---|
| Returned a person | 653 | 94.5% |
| At least one phone number | 646 | 93.5% |
| Two or more phone numbers | 516 | 74.7% |
| Three phone numbers | 466 | 67.4% |
| At least one email address | 539 | 78.0% |
| No match at all | 38 | 5.5% |
Of the 646 records with a phone, the top-ranked number was a mobile 532 times (82.4%). Total spend across the whole set: 3,265 credits, or $65.30.
Source: FlaggedLeads first-party skip tracing log, 691 address-only lookups via Tracerfy across seven Puget Sound markets, May 27 to July 8, 2026.
A 94.5% hit rate is higher than the industry chatter would suggest, and I think the reason is boring: single-family residential addresses in a metro area are the easiest possible input. Rural land, new construction, and recently subdivided parcels all match worse. Do not read my number as a promise about your market.
The part vendors leave out
Here is the test that changed how I spend money on this.
For every trace that came back, I compared the mailing address the vendor returned against the mailing address the county assessor already published on the parcel record. On the 561 records where I could compare both, 389 of them matched. That is 69.3%.
Seven times out of ten, I paid for an address the county had already given me for nothing.
That is not an argument against skip tracing. It is an argument about sequence. Across our seven markets, the county mailing address is on file for 292,220 of 296,651 parcels, which is 98.5%. If your goal is to put a letter in front of an owner, that field solves it before you open your wallet, and it solves it for absentee owners especially well, because the tax bill follows them wherever they actually live.
So the honest version of the workflow is: the county gets you the owner and an address that reaches them. The vendor gets you a phone.
When paying is the right call
I am not talking anybody out of this. There are four situations where I pay without hesitating.
- You want to call or text. Direct mail is patient and cheap. A phone conversation this week is neither, and it converts better. There is no free public source for a current cell number, so this is the real product.
- Your letter came back undeliverable. The county record is only as current as the last time somebody updated it. When mail bounces, the owner moved and the vendor is your way to follow them.
- The parcel has no mailing address on file. That is 1.5% of our parcels, and those are disproportionately the messy, interesting ones.
- The name on the deed is a dead end. Estates, out-of-state trusts, dissolved entities. Though before you pay, check whether the answer is sitting in a Secretary of State filing, because finding the person behind an LLC-owned property is usually free.
Notice what is missing from that list: "I need to know who owns it." That one is a public records question with a free answer.
The mistake that costs the most
The expensive error is not paying for skip tracing. It is paying for it too early.
You pay per record. So every address you carry into the trace that was never going to be a lead is money you set on fire. A closed case from 2019, a construction permit violation where the owner is actively improving the property, a duplicate parcel you never deduped. All of it bills the same as a real lead.
When I ran the numbers on a raw Seattle export, 84,430 rows collapsed to 47,108 unique properties, and the genuinely sharp subset was a few hundred. At $0.10 a record, tracing the raw file instead of the filtered one is the difference between $65 and $8,443, for the same handful of conversations. That whole triage sequence is in how to filter a code violation list.
Filter first. Pay second. Everything else about skip tracing is a detail.
One warning about the name that comes back
An address-only trace returns whoever the data associates with that address, and that person is not always the owner.
On my traced set, which is about 80% absentee-owned by the county mailing address test, 226 of 603 comparable hits (37.5%) returned a person whose own address is the property itself. On a list built from absentee owners, a meaningful share of those are tenants and occupants rather than the person on the deed.
So cross-check the returned name against the county owner of record before you use it in a letter. Calling a renter to ask if they want to sell the house they live in is a bad first impression, and it is entirely avoidable. If you are working from a list of addresses with no names attached, skip tracing by address only covers that workflow and its failure modes in full.
The short version
Get the owner and the mailing address from the county. Filter the list down to the properties you would genuinely buy. Then, if you want to pick up the phone, pay for the numbers on what is left.
That ordering is why my bill is $65.30 instead of four figures, and my mail still lands.
If you would rather not assemble the county side by hand, the free FlaggedLeads map already matches code violations to ownership across our live markets, and you can browse by neighborhood in Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Burien, and Pierce County. Paid exports carry the owner and mailing address, so the only thing left to buy is a phone number. The wider version of this workflow lives in the distressed property playbook.
Frequently asked questions
What is skip tracing in real estate?
Skip tracing is paying a data vendor to append current contact information, usually phone numbers and email addresses, to an address or owner name you already have. Investors use it to reach the owner of a property that is not for sale. The data comes from aggregated consumer sources like credit header files, utility records, and public filings, so it is a contact-data tool rather than an ownership record.
Do I need to pay for skip tracing?
Only if you want a phone number or email. The county assessor publishes the owner of record and a tax-billing mailing address for free, and across our seven Puget Sound markets that mailing address is on file for 98.5% of parcels. When I compared paid results against the county record on 561 properties, 69.3% returned the same mailing address the county already had. Mail first, pay when you want to call.
What is a good skip tracing hit rate?
On my own first-party log of 691 address-only lookups run between May 27 and July 8, 2026, 94.5% returned a person and 93.5% returned at least one phone number. Single-family addresses in a metro area match best. Rural parcels, new construction, and recently split lots return lower rates, so treat any published benchmark as specific to the list it came from.
How much does skip tracing cost?
I pay $0.10 per successful match through Tracerfy (5 credits at $0.02 each), and misses cost nothing. My total spend across 691 lookups was $65.30. Per-record pricing varies by vendor and by volume commitment, and subscription plans bundle it differently, so compare on cost per usable phone number rather than headline price.
Is skip tracing legal for real estate investors?
Yes, the practice itself is legal and widely used. The limits are on what you do with the data. Results from a standard skip trace are not permissible for FCRA-covered decisions like tenant screening or credit, and calling or texting the mobile numbers you get puts you under the federal do-not-call and TCPA rules. Check the current requirements before you launch a calling campaign.
Can you skip trace with just an address and no owner name?
Yes. Every lookup in my 691-record set was submitted as an address with no name attached, and 94.5% returned a person. The catch is that an address-only match returns whoever the data associates with that address, which on a rental can be the tenant. Verify the returned name against the county owner of record before you use it.