4 Industries that Use Skip Tracing Technology  

At one point, skip-tracing technology was essentially limited to niche fields. It was particularly relevant in areas like debt collection, where the financial stakes were fairly high.

Think about it like this. If you were going to pay someone to pour over public records, knock on doors, and use other time-consuming methods to attempt to find someone, there had better be some type of financial reward at the end of that process. The amount you spend on skip tracing must be outweighed by the amount you could potentially recover. Otherwise, it isn’t worth the expense in the first place – let alone the amount of effort required.

Thanks to modern technology, however, things have changed. Skip tracing is far more straightforward and accessible, making it a valuable tool across a variety of industries. While the core technologies may be the same, how they’re being used can vary wildly in ways that are worth a closer look.

1. Real Estate Investing

Skip tracing in real estate is one of the best examples of this type of technology being used in a setting where it may not have been relevant 20 years ago.

For example, many real estate investors utilize skip-tracing tactics to unearth potential leads. An agent might use skip tracing to find a property owner and ask if they want to sell their homes. This can be a great way to find hot new properties before they hit the market, thus eliminating competition and securing a great sale.

Similarly to the way it is used in debt collection, skip tracing is often used by mortgage lenders to find homeowners of properties that may be in foreclosure or at least headed in that direction.

2. Insurance Claims

Another common way that skip tracing is employed in the modern era has to do with the insurance industry. Insurance companies regularly utilize skip tracing to, among other things, verify claimants and even detect fraud.

An insurance company might need to use skip tracing to locate someone making an insurance claim to verify that they are who they say they are. If someone’s identity is stolen, one of the first things a fraudster might do is file a false insurance claim. The theory is that this is a way to financially benefit without alerting the victim as quickly as something like credit card fraud would.

The insurance industry also regularly uses skip tracing for things like beneficiary searches. If someone moves or changes their contact information, they’re still entitled to the payout from a policy if they are listed as the beneficiary. Skip tracing in the insurance industry can help make things right again.

3. Employee Verification

Skip tracing is also commonly used in employee verification, a process that businesses of all types employ regularly.

Whenever a business goes through the hiring and onboarding process, one of the first things they do is verify someone’s information on a resume or other forms that have been filled out. At the very least, the employer wants to ensure that the prospect has gone through a background check and is authorized to work in the United States.

To do this, they’ll enlist the help of a background check firm. That firm will utilize various skip-tracing techniques to provide far more accurate employee verification methods than ever before. The business can then confidently proceed with the onboarding process, knowing that everything they’ve been provided with is accurate and that nothing objectionable has been found.

4. Sales, Marketing, and Beyond

Finally, skip tracing is regularly used within the sales and marketing fields. You might not think that sales and marketing would need to locate hard-to-find individuals, but in many ways, that’s a big part of their job. So much of a brand’s success in terms of marketing involves getting the right message in front of the right person at exactly the right time. To get to that point, it stands to reason that you need to know where the right person actually is.

Over time, sales and marketing professionals have started using sip tracing to reconnect with lost leads, for example. If you go to an in-person networking opportunity like a convention, you’ll get contact information for a huge number of people. By the time you contact all of them, someone may have changed positions or even careers. Skip tracing can help put you back into contact with them, making sure that you’re able to continue that relationship in a way that benefits you both.

Skip tracing in sales and marketing can also be a great way to identify potential customers. In this way, it’s being used not unlike the way it is in the real estate profession. It’s all about quickly and easily finding people who are likely your best customers so that you can contact them and get their business before anyone else can. Any step you can use to get a leg up on your competitors is worth taking, after all.

In the past, skip tracing was traditionally employed by debt collectors and private investigators. It wouldn’t be unheard of for it to be used in another industry, but it wasn’t necessarily expected, either.

Now, skip tracing is for absolutely anyone who needs to locate a hard-to-find individual. Technology has essentially made it industry-agnostic. It’s still being used to find missing debtors for collection agencies, but the broader implications are so much larger than that.

It all serves to underline a lesson that is worth repeating. Skip tracing can empower businesses of all shapes, sizes, and types by taking advantage of public records databases, social media, and even specialized software. If an organization is attempting to find someone and can’t, skip tracing is likely the silver bullet they’ve been looking for. Not only does this go a long way toward increasing efficiency, but it can also help improve their bottom line.