What comes back from a skip trace

The fields

Owner name, as it appears on the property record. This is the match key, and it is also the field most likely to be wrong — counties record names inconsistently, and a hyphenated surname or a middle initial in the wrong place is enough to break a match.

Property address: the parcel itself. Mailing address where it differs, which is quietly one of the most useful fields in the file — a mailing address in another state is the clearest single signal that the owner does not live there.

County and list type, so a file you come back to in three months still says what it is.

And the phone number, which is the point of the exercise.

Where rows disappear

Entities. An LLC, a trust, an estate, a bank or a county forfeiture case is not a person who answers a phone. In some tax-delinquent exports these are a startling share of the rows.

No usable name. Pre-foreclosure exports in particular often carry a blank first name with the entity crammed into the surname field, and there is nothing to trace.

No match. The name and address combination returns nothing. This is normal and unavoidable, and the only question that matters commercially is whether you were billed for it.

No mobile. The record matched, but everything attached to it is a landline or a VoIP line. For a texting campaign that is a row you cannot use.

Reading the file honestly

The number worth tracking is not rows delivered, it is rows you would put in a dialer. Those two figures drift apart fastest on files billed per submitted record rather than per delivered one.

It is also worth looking at the mailing-address column before you start calling. A file where most mailing addresses match the property is a file of owner-occupants, and the conversation you are about to have is a different one from the absentee case.

In our own files, unmatched rows are credited back and landlines and VoIP are dropped before billing, which is a deliberate way of making the delivered count and the usable count the same number.