How to find skip tracing data for real estate wholesaling

Key Takeaways

What does "skip tracing" actually mean in a real estate context? Finding current contact information for a property owner who isn't easy to reach directly — the name comes from public records (probate, foreclosure, tax lien filings), but the filing itself rarely includes a working phone number or current address, especially for an owner who has moved or inherited the property.

Why does this actor accept a phone and email input if it doesn't use them? So it's a drop-in replacement in pipelines built around other skip-trace tools that do support phone/email reverse-lookup — Radaris itself only supports name-based search, so those two fields are accepted but ignored rather than causing an error.

Is this the same kind of data BatchSkipTracing or similar paid tools return? The same class of data — address history, relatives, aliases — sourced from the same category of aggregated public records. The difference is access model: this reads Radaris's own public profile pages directly rather than reselling a proprietary skip-trace database.

From a Filing to a Reachable Person

A distressed-property filing typically gives you a defendant or debtor name and little else:

{
  "event_type": "sheriff_sale",
  "case_number": "2012-5883",
  "defendant_name": "GREGORY DELORIMIER / MILDRED C DELORIMIER",
  "county": "Orleans", "state": "LA"
}

That name is the input to skip tracing, not the output. The Radaris People Search actor takes exactly that — a full name, optionally narrowed by city or state — and returns matched public-record profiles:

{
  "type": "skip_trace_person",
  "fullName": "Gregory Delorimier",
  "age": 58,
  "addresses": [
    { "street": "1420 Example Ave", "city": "New Orleans", "state": "LA", "zip": "70115" }
  ],
  "relatives": [{ "name": "Mildred C Delorimier", "relation": "spouse" }],
  "alternateNames": ["Greg Delorimier"],
  "latitude": 29.928,
  "longitude": -90.087
}

Passing state: "LA" (matching the filing's own state) pushes the correct match to the top of the results when the name is common — Radaris indexes purely by name, so a state or city filter is the main lever for disambiguating between multiple people sharing a name.

Why HTTP-Only Matters Here

Radaris People Search is deliberately HTTP-only — no browser runtime, no cookies, no login — which means it runs cheaply and finishes in seconds per lookup. For a skip-tracing step that might run against hundreds of names pulled from a batch of county filings, that per-lookup cost and speed compounds: a browser-based scraper doing the same volume would cost meaningfully more in compute time alone.

relatives is worth checking even when the primary person's own address doesn't resolve cleanly — a listed spouse, sibling, or adult child sometimes has a more current or reliable address on file, and their name becomes a secondary lookup.

Chaining From Filing to Contact List

async function buildContactList(filings) {
  const contacts = [];
  for (const filing of filings) {
    const names = filing.defendant_name.split(" / "); // multiple defendants often joined this way
    for (const name of names) {
      const [match] = await runActor("radaris-people-search", {
        fullName: name.trim(),
        state: filing.state,
        maxItems: 1,
      });
      if (match?.addresses?.length) {
        contacts.push({ caseNumber: filing.case_number, name: match.fullName, address: match.addresses[0] });
      }
    }
  }
  return contacts;
}

Run this after pulling the raw filings from the Distressed Property Lead Scraper — skip tracing is the enrichment step between "here's a legal filing" and "here's someone to actually mail or call," covered in more depth in Finding Distressed Property Leads Before They Hit the MLS.

FAQ

Does this work for people outside the United States? No — Radaris indexes US public records only.

What should you do when a name returns zero matches or an ambiguous set of results? Zero matches usually means the name is misspelled in the source filing (court records are hand-entered and error-prone) or the person has an unusually thin public-record footprint. For an ambiguous set of common-name matches, narrow further with city in addition to state, or fall back to the relatives field on a matched profile as a secondary path to the right household.

Browse the real estate actor category for the rest of ParseBird's property data sources.