Here’s How Skip Tracing Can Help Your Business Get Paid

No business likes to lose a customer for any reason. Sometimes, people move away, or a particular product or service no longer fits their lifestyle. In other situations, though, someone might disappear for more nefarious reasons—like trying to avoid paying money that they owe.

Organizations still have several options, even if someone has gone to great lengths to hide their location. One of the most effective methods is skip tracing, which can be helpful in fields like debt collection, real estate, legal services, and more. As a concept, skip tracing has been around for many years. Over the last decade, however, technology has evolved to the point where skip tracing is more relevant and practical than ever.

How Skip Tracing Works

Skip tracing is a technique that lets you pull data from a wide range of different sources into a “single source of truth” for your efforts. This can include (but is certainly not limited to) places like:

• Public records.
• Databases.
• Social media accounts.

Having this information in a single location can make understanding the “bigger picture” of who you’re looking for easier. At the very least, it can help uncover trends and patterns you may have missed. This helps professional skip tracers track down those hard-to-reach individuals, allowing businesses to recover any money owed. It also enables those organizations to complete any transactions that may be outstanding.

By taking what is an inherently complicated process and turning it into something more manageable, skip tracing can save businesses a sometimes dramatic amount of time and money over the long haul.

Practical Examples of Skip Tracing In Action

When most people hear about the various skip-tracing techniques, they typically assume that their primary purpose is debt collection. In many situations, someone will have moved to avoid contact with creditors intentionally. Skip tracing can help find their current address, their job’s address, or some other type of contact information so that you can resume trying to repay that debt. If nothing else, the data uncovered via skip tracing can also be helpful in any legal proceedings.

But in terms of saving time and money, skip tracing is much more versatile than that. Take skip tracing in real estate, for example. Almost more so than in any other industry, success in real estate depends on your ability to work at a high volume. If you’re trying to acquire new properties, you must do so quickly and below market value before someone else can beat you.

Skip tracing can be a great way to do this, as you can use many of the techniques above to find and contact absentee owners. If there is a distressed property that appears to be abandoned that you have your eye on, you can use skip tracing to find who owns it. You can then start a conversation with them to see if they’re willing to sell quickly (and potentially at a discount).

You could even use skip tracing to reach out to property owners who may be behind on certain financial obligations, like taxes. You could contact them and make them an offer on their property that is below market value. They would get a short-term resolution to their problem, and you would get a property in a potentially up-and-coming area to invest in and sell at a profit later.

Another excellent example of how versatile these techniques can be involves the legal profession, where they can be enormously helpful in all areas of practice. Family attorneys rely on it in cases that involve child support or custody disputes. Sometimes, a parent will relocate without informing their former spouse or the court. Skip tracing can be used to find where this person is, allowing new or existing legal arrangements to be enforced.

Either way, it’s a fast and efficient way to achieve the desired outcome in a family law case. This ensures that the case is resolved, the client is satisfied, and the attorney is paid as soon as possible.In all these examples, you can make progress on your goals and get paid far faster and more efficiently than you would be on your own.

Skip tracing is also commonly employed when probate and estate matters must be enforced. Especially when probate cases get complicated and many parties are involved, locating heirs can be time-consuming, to say the least. The same is true of beneficiaries or anyone else with a say in the matter.

But things can’t move forward unless everyone is contacted correctly and notified, which is where skip tracing proves its worth. It can help professionals find heirs, beneficiaries, and other parties quickly and efficiently so that things can continue and the business in question can get paid by their clients as soon as possible.

Using Modern Technology to Your Advantage

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about skip tracing in real estate, debt collection, or some other industry. This collection of tools and techniques continues to prove its worth repeatedly.

If someone is deliberately trying to evade paying a legitimate debt, they should be tracked down, and the situation should be rectified. But you’re also talking about something that runs a fair bit deeper than that. Real estate agents can use it to locate potential financiers and other clients interested in a property. Attorneys can use it to find people who have skipped out on their legal obligations. Police officers can use it to find criminals.

Especially when someone intentionally tries to hide, their techniques will constantly evolve. Businesses need to grow along with them to stay one step ahead. Skip tracing is and will always be a big part of how you do it.