Skip Tracing
Skip tracing is the process of finding a person's current contact information — phone numbers, email addresses, and sometimes a better mailing address — by matching their name and known address against public records and proprietary databases.
Where the term comes from
The name comes from debt collection — locating someone who "skipped town." In real estate the person hasn't gone anywhere: county records name the owner of every parcel but almost never include a phone number. Skip tracing bridges that gap, turning a list of parcels into a list of people you can call.
What it costs
Pricing is per lookup: bulk services aimed at investors commonly run roughly $0.10–$0.25 per record, while premium API-based providers charge more per hit for better match rates and fresher data. Two details matter more than the headline rate: whether the provider bills per hit or per lookup, and how fresh the data is — a number that's three owners old costs more in wasted dials than the price difference of a better provider.
The compliance baseline
Skip tracing itself is legal — the data comes from public records and permissible-purpose sources. What's regulated is what you do with the results: scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry, respect state calling rules, and treat autodialers and texting as a stricter regime under the TCPA.
In WhoseTitle, discovery from county records is free, and skip tracing runs on your own provider key only for the leads you choose to work — so you pay for contacts, not for browsing.