Use Case
Skip tracing built for wholesalers
Pay $0.05 per successful lookup. Upload a CSV of absentee owners, get back phones and emails, and start dialing the same afternoon.
Wholesaling is a volume game. You build a list of absentee owners, pre-foreclosures, or tired landlords, you skip trace it, and then you spend the next two weeks burning through phone numbers until somebody says "yeah, what would you offer?" The math only works if your cost per contact stays low.
Most skip tracing vendors price like they forgot wholesalers exist. $0.15, $0.20, sometimes $0.25 per record — fine if you're running 50 leads a month, brutal if you're running 5,000. Skipreach charges $0.05 per successful lookup. No monthly minimums, no seat fees, no "contact sales for enterprise pricing." You pay for what hits, and that's it.
This page covers how wholesalers actually use the API: where to source lists, how to filter for phones you can legally text, the bulk CSV flow, and what match rates to expect on the kind of stale, off-market data wholesale lists are built from.
The volume math: why $0.05 matters
Run the numbers on a typical wholesale campaign and the per-lookup price stops being a rounding error.
| List size | Skipreach ($0.05) | Typical match-based vendor ($0.15) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 absentee owners | $50 | $150 | $100 |
| 5,000 pre-foreclosures | $250 | $750 | $500 |
| 10,000 county-wide pull | $500 | $1,500 | $1,000 |
That gap is the difference between testing three list sources a month and testing one. Wholesalers who win are the ones who can iterate on lists cheaply — pull a list, trace it, run a 2-week dial campaign, see what converts, then double down or kill it. If skip tracing eats your testing budget, you stop testing.
The catch most vendors won't tell you: "per match" pricing sounds fair but the match definition is often loose. We only charge when we return a usable phone or email tied to the person you asked about. No phone, no charge.
Where wholesale lists come from
Skip tracing is downstream of list building. The quality of your contacts is capped by the quality of the source list, so it's worth being deliberate about what you feed in.
- Absentee owners. Owner mailing address ≠ situs address. Pulled from county assessor data, usually filtered to single-family or 2-4 unit. The bread and butter of wholesale.
- Pre-foreclosure / lis pendens. Notice of default or notice of trustee sale records, scraped from county recorder sites or bought from a list provider. High motivation, high competition.
- Probate. Estates in probate where heirs may want to liquidate. Court records, often county-by-county.
- Tax delinquent. Owners behind on property taxes. County treasurer's office.
- Code violations and vacant. City code enforcement databases, USPS vacancy data.
- High equity + long tenure. Owners who've held 10+ years with 50%+ equity. Not distressed, but ripe for downsizing pitches.
For all of these, what you have at the start is a name and a property address — not a phone number. That's where the API comes in. See skip tracing for real estate for the broader workflow across investor types.
The bulk CSV flow
You don't need to write code to use Skipreach. The bulk CSV flow is the path most wholesalers take:
- Export your list with columns for first name, last name, mailing address, city, state, zip.
- Drop the CSV into the dashboard upload form.
- We process the file, run each row through our identity graph, and append phone numbers, line types, and emails.
- Download the enriched CSV. You're charged only for the rows we successfully matched.
For wholesalers who run thousands of records weekly, the API endpoint takes the same input shape and returns JSON, so you can wire it directly into your data pipeline. Most users start with CSV and only move to API when their list-pulling cron jobs justify the lift.
Phone line type filtering and TCPA
This is the part most wholesalers either ignore or get wrong, and it's the one that can actually cost you money.
The TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act) restricts autodialed and prerecorded calls and texts to wireless numbers without prior express consent. The rules are messy, the case law is messier, and statutory damages run $500–$1,500 per violation. You don't need to be a lawyer to wholesale, but you do need to know which numbers in your list are landlines vs wireless vs VoIP — because your dialer and your texting platform treat them differently.
Every record we return includes a line type field: mobile, landline, or voip. Use it like this:
- Texting campaigns: filter to mobile only. Many texting platforms outright refuse landlines, and texting a VoIP number can land you on the wrong side of carrier filtering even when it's technically legal.
- Manual dialing: all line types are fair game, since manual single-touch calls aren't autodialer-restricted under the same standard.
- Power dialer / predictive dialer: talk to your compliance counsel. The safe default most wholesalers use is to scrub against the National DNC list and avoid wireless numbers in autodialed campaigns.
None of this is legal advice — it's the practical version of what we hear from operators. Get a real lawyer if you're scaling.
Match rate expectations
Wholesale lists are some of the harder data to skip trace, and anyone telling you they hit 95% match rates on a 10,000-row absentee list is selling you something.
Realistic ranges, based on what we see from wholesaler customers running our identity graph against typical lists:
- Fresh absentee owner lists from county data: 65–80% match rate on at least one phone or email.
- Pre-foreclosure lists: 60–75%. Owners in distress often have stale contact info.
- Probate lists: 50–70%. The owner of record is often deceased; you're really tracing heirs.
- Tax delinquent and vacant: 55–70%. Tends to overlap with absentee, so similar quality.
These are ranges, not promises. Match quality depends on the age of the underlying records, how common the names are, and whether the mailing address gives the graph enough to disambiguate. Because you only pay for hits, the floor on cost is the match rate × $0.05, not the list size × $0.05. A 1,000-row list at 70% match runs you $35.
REI CRM integrations
Wholesalers don't live in spreadsheets — at least not for long. The two CRMs we see most often in wholesale stacks are Podio (with custom workflows like GlobiFlow) and REsimpli, with InvestorFuse and Lead Sherpa close behind for dialer-centric ops.
The integration pattern is the same regardless of CRM:
- Pull your lead list from the CRM as a CSV (or via the CRM's API if you're handy).
- Run it through Skipreach.
- Push the enriched data back as new fields on the lead — phone1, phone1_type, phone2, phone2_type, email1.
For Podio specifically, GlobiFlow can call our REST endpoint directly on lead creation, so a new lead from your direct mail response form gets skip traced before it ever hits a virtual assistant's queue. For REsimpli, most users do batched daily uploads against their incoming lead pulls. We don't have a one-click integration with either today — we kept the API simple enough that it's a 30-minute build for someone who already knows their CRM.
A distressed-list-to-cold-call workflow
Here's the end-to-end most wholesalers run, with rough timing for a 2,000-row weekly list:
- Monday morning: Pull this week's pre-foreclosure list from your county data source. Clean it — dedupe by APN, drop properties under $50k ARV, drop trusts and LLCs you can't easily pierce.
- Monday afternoon: Upload to Skipreach. CSV processing for 2,000 rows usually takes a few minutes. Download the enriched file.
- Tuesday: Split the file into a texting list (mobile only) and a calling list (everything else). Push the texting list into your SMS platform after DNC scrubbing. Push the calling list into your dialer.
- Tuesday–Friday: Run the campaign. Track responses, hangups, dead numbers, and DNC requests in your CRM.
- Following Monday: Pull the response data, look at cost per lead and cost per appointment. Compare against last week. Adjust list source, script, or filter criteria.
The whole point of the $0.05 price is that step 1 doesn't require a budget meeting. You can test a new list source on a Tuesday and have results by Friday without explaining yourself to anyone.
What we don't do
Being honest about trade-offs: Skipreach is a data API, not a wholesaling platform. We don't:
- Build lists for you. Bring your own absentee/probate/pre-foreclosure data from a list source or county records.
- Run your dialer or texting. We hand you numbers and line types — you plug them into your tool of choice.
- Provide a CRM. We integrate with yours.
- Scrub against the National DNC. That's a separate (cheap) service and you should be running it before any autodialed campaign.
If you want an all-in-one wholesale platform with built-in lists, dialer, and CRM, that's a different product category and you'll pay for it. If you already have your stack and just need clean contact data at the lowest sustainable price, that's us. For a head-to-head with the most common all-in-one option wholesalers ask about, see Skipreach vs BatchData.