Skip tracing is the process of taking a name and finding a way to reach that person — a current phone number and email. In real estate, it is how investors and brokers turn a list of property owners into actual conversations. Done right, it is a routine research step; done wrong, it is a pile of disconnected numbers.
The challenge in commercial and multifamily real estate is that the owner of record is almost never a person. It is an LLC — "123 Main Holdings LLC" — and you cannot skip trace an LLC. Skip-tracing services match on people: a first and last name plus an address. Feed them an LLC and you get nothing back.
So the real first step is not tracing at all — it is identifying the human behind the entity. (See how to find a property owner in NYC.) For multifamily buildings, the HPD registration's Head Officer is the most reliable free source of a real name and mailing address.
Once you have a real person and an address, the workflow is straightforward. First, assemble a clean list: owner name, property address, and — critically — the owner's mailing address, which is often a better match anchor than the building itself. Second, run that list through a skip-tracing provider, which cross-references it against phone, utility and public-record databases to return current contact details. Third, join the results back to your properties so each building carries the contact for its owner.
Quality depends on inputs. A real person plus a current mailing address returns far better matches than an LLC plus a building address. Always treat results as leads to verify, not facts — numbers go stale.
Crezly streamlines this whole loop for subscribers. From the Owner Debt tools in the Data Suite you can export a clean, skip-trace-ready list of filtered owners — already enriched with the HPD Head Officer's name and mailing address where available — run it through your tracing provider, and import the results so the gated Contact column fills in by building.
Owner names and holdings are public record and shown openly across Crezly. Phone numbers and emails are personal data, so they are gated behind the paid plan and never published on public pages.
What is skip tracing in real estate?
Skip tracing is finding current contact details — phone and email — for a property owner, so you can reach out about buying, selling or financing their building.
Why can't I skip trace an LLC?
Skip-tracing databases match on individual people, not companies. You must first identify the real person behind the LLC — for NYC multifamily, usually the HPD Head Officer — before tracing.
Is skip tracing legal?
Skip tracing uses public and commercially available records and is widely used in real estate and collections. How you use the results is governed by contact and privacy laws such as the TCPA, so follow them and treat contacts as leads to verify.