Truly, it doesn’t matter what type of business you’re talking about—skip tracing is a crucial skill for businesses trying to operate in the fast-paced digital world we live in.
At its core, skip tracing is locating people who have essentially vanished, seemingly from the face of the Earth. The most apparent reason why they might do this is because they owe a company money. Sometimes, people desperately try to avoid paying a debt and will go to any lengths to do that. But other times, things are more complex.
In real estate, for example, skip tracing might be used to locate the rightful owner of a property so that you can bid on it before it formally goes on the market. Law enforcement might use skip tracing to find someone avoiding a court order.
Regardless, skip tracing has proven invaluable time and again. The sooner you master the fine art of skip tracing for your own business, the sooner you give yourself a potential advantage in the marketplace.
The Ongoing Benefits of Skip Tracing
The number one benefit of skip tracing, no matter the industry, is how it helps organizations recoup funds they are rightfully owed. Debt collectors are the classic example in that they use it constantly. If someone has gone “off the grid” to avoid paying a debt, skip tracing can help you re-establish contact. Even if you don’t get 100% of the money you’re owed, you can negotiate and hopefully get something more than the $0.00 you currently have.
Skip tracing is also commonly used in legal services. Sometimes, a person might have relevant information to a case, but it’s difficult to find for whatever reason. Skip tracing can locate it quickly, allowing the case to proceed so that the legal professionals can get paid just as quickly.
The Essential Tools of the Trade
Thanks to the rate at which technology advances, skip tracing has become more efficient (and more effective) over the last few years in particular.
Many skip-tracing professionals have always relied on public record database searches to find leads and locate hard-to-find individuals, for example. Today, you can do this without ever leaving your house. Most large cities and counties let you look at court records, property records, and more from your web browser.
Social media has also become an invaluable resource that professionals use to find people or, at the very least collect more actionable information that they can work from. For example, if the person you’re looking for has an Instagram profile, they’re probably using it to post pictures of their lives. You might be able to glean valuable insight into who they’re with or what they’re doing, even if you can’t figure out explicitly where they are.
LinkedIn is a professional social network that many people use to connect with colleagues and find work. Oftentimes, this can help professionals put together a picture of someone’s past employment and education history. It’s also a way to see who they’re connecting with professionally.
If the person you’re looking for has connected on LinkedIn with 10+ people who all work for the same company, it can be reasonable to assume that they work there, too. At the very least, they have some sort of connection with that place and those people. All this can help you fill in a few blanks you may be missing.
Throughout all this, however, it’s essential to maintain legal compliance. Looking at social media and public records databases is legal, but one must resist the urge to engage in anything that might fall outside those boundaries. You need to maintain ethical practices in the skip-tracing process at all times.
Essential Skip Tracing Strategies to Rely On
Regarding skip tracing, it’s important to enter the situation with the proper expectations. You’ll definitely be disappointed if you think you’ll head to a computer, type in a person’s name, and use highly advanced techniques to locate them instantly.
Instead, think of what you’re doing, like putting together a puzzle. Searching public record databases might return a few pieces. Searching social media might return a few more. You might get the contact information of an associate, and you can call for a few more.
The point is that everything you’re doing builds upon everything else. This is why it’s important to build rapport with anyone else you engage with during this process. You never know when they might have valuable information.
If your work takes you down a dead end, that’s okay. Retrace your steps and return to the last actionable piece of information you had. See if the pieces you already have fit together differently. Look at things from a new perspective.
It might take a little longer than you expect, but skip tracing will give you everything you need to put together the puzzle and view the complete picture as it relates to where someone currently is. You just have to stay vigilant along the way.
Skip Tracing: A Multi-Industry Research Tool
In the end, remember that skip tracing is hardly a new concept. For as long as the idea of “debt” has existed, there have been people willing to disappear to avoid paying theirs. Because of that, there has always been a need to find those individuals, regardless of the lengths they’re willing to go to elude others.
What is always changing is the technology at the heart of skip tracing. If you could go back in time and tell a professional skip tracer from 1980 that one day they would have a seemingly endless amount of personal information to draw from about where someone is, who they’re with, where they’ve been, and more, those pros would probably think you were lying. Flash forward to today, and we have social media.
The point is that mastering the fine art of skip tracing isn’t something you “do once and forget about.” You’ll always want to work hard to keep up with the latest trends and best practices. Not only do they help guarantee success in your efforts, but they also allow you to stay one step ahead of those who are trying to hide.
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