Ava Data Glossary
Skip tracing & real-estate data, defined.
Plain-English definitions of the data terms that drive modern real-estate prospecting — paired with how Ava Data handles each one in the dashboard and via the API.
This glossary defines the vocabulary of off-market property data — absentee owner, list stacking, relational mapping, driving for dollars — and states how Ava Data, LLC handles each term as a product step: List Builder pulls the list, List Stacking isolates the owners that appear on more than one, and a matched phone costs 1 credit (2¢).
How do these terms fit together in one workflow?
The terms in this glossary describe four consecutive steps, not four separate topics. Most off-market prospecting runs through them in this order:
- Build the list. Pick a segment from the public record — absentee owners, tax-delinquent properties, probate — and pull it by state, county, city or ZIP in List Builder at 1 credit per record.
- Stack the lists. List stacking combines those pulls and keeps the owners that appear on two or more, which is a shorter list and a cheaper one to trace.
- Skip trace the survivors. Skip tracing turns a name and property address into a current phone and email — 1 credit (2¢) for a phone, 2 credits (4¢) for phone + email, 10 credits (20¢) for a Deep Search that adds relatives and associates. Nothing is charged when there is no match.
- Work the list and re-trace. Push the results into Follow Up Boss or export up to 35 columns, then re-trace the non-connects: the identity graph behind the data refreshes every 24 hours, so a list worked over months does not have to be re-bought to be current.
Definitions below cover each step, plus the deal structures (subject-to, novation, creative financing) the lists are usually worked for.
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Skip Tracing
Skip tracing is the process of locating a person's current contact information — phone numbers, email addresses, and known associates — by stitching together public records, utility data, and proprietary identity graphs.
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Relational Mapping
Relational mapping expands a skip trace from a single subject to their household and immediate network — spouses, siblings, parents, adult children, and known associates — to give you a back-door path when the primary number is dead.
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Landlord Skip Tracing
Landlord skip tracing takes a property's owner name and address and returns the landlord's current phone and email — typically used by wholesalers and acquisition teams to reach out-of-state landlords directly instead of going through a property manager.
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Driving for Dollars
Driving for dollars is the real-estate prospecting practice of physically driving neighborhoods to spot distressed properties, then skip-tracing the owners to make a direct cash offer — turning visual signals (overgrown lawns, boarded windows, deferred maintenance) into a contactable lead list.
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People Search API (Person Data API)
A people search API — often called a person data API — programmatically returns identity and contact information for an individual given a name and a few disambiguating fields: address, city, state, age, or DOB.
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CRM Enrichment
CRM enrichment is the process of automatically appending missing fields — phone, email, mailing address, related persons — to records already in your CRM, usually via webhook or scheduled batch job.
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Batch Skip Tracing
Batch skip tracing — also called bulk skip tracing — runs a skip trace over a whole list of records at once, typically a CSV of names and addresses, and returns matched contact information as a downloadable file or through an async API.
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List Stacking
List stacking combines several property-owner lists into one and keeps the owners that appear on more than one, trading raw list volume for signal count so the records you pay to skip trace are the ones with more than a single reason to sell.
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Absentee Owner
An absentee owner is the legal owner of a property whose mailing address differs from the property address — typically a landlord, an inherited-property holder, or an out-of-state investor — and a top target for off-market acquisitions.
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Distressed Property Leads
Distressed property leads are owners of homes facing financial or physical distress — pre-foreclosure, tax-delinquent, code-violation, vacant, or inherited — and are the highest-converting segment for wholesalers and cash buyers.
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Probate Leads
Probate leads are heirs and personal representatives of estates currently in probate court — typically owners of inherited real estate they did not buy and often do not want to keep.
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Pre-Foreclosure Leads
Pre-foreclosure leads are homeowners against whom a Notice of Default or Lis Pendens has been recorded but whose property has not yet been sold at auction — the window in which a cash offer can prevent foreclosure.
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Tax-Delinquent Properties
Tax-delinquent properties are parcels whose owners have fallen behind on county property taxes — a public-record signal of financial distress and one of the highest-converting lead sources for cash buyers.
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Subject-To (SubTo) Real Estate
Subject-to — often shortened to SubTo or sub2 — is a creative-finance strategy where a buyer takes over a property's existing mortgage payments without formally assuming the loan, acquiring the deed while the seller's financing stays in place.
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Gator Method (Gator Lending)
The Gator Method is a creative-finance strategy where an investor — the 'gator' — funds short-term transactional costs such as earnest money deposits on other investors' deals in exchange for a fee. Gators underwrite in hours, which is why confirming the seller behind a contract with one Deep Search — 10 credits, 20¢ — belongs before the wire, not after it.
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How to Find the Owner of a Property
Finding a property's owner takes two steps: identify the owner of record through public sources like the county assessor, then find current contact information — the step where most searches stall and where skip tracing does the real work.
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Creative Financing
Creative financing is the family of real-estate acquisition strategies — subject-to, seller financing, novation, lease options, and private lending — that structure deals without a conventional bank mortgage, usually by working directly with the seller.
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Novation (Real Estate)
A novation agreement replaces an existing purchase contract's obligations with a new set, letting an investor renovate, list, and sell a property on the owner's behalf and split the resale upside instead of buying the house outright. Every novation starts with an owner conversation, which is why the pipeline runs on traced contact data — 1 credit, 2¢, per matched phone through Ava Data.
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Motivated Seller Leads
Motivated seller leads are property owners with a situational reason to sell quickly or flexibly — pre-foreclosure, inheritance, tax delinquency, tired landlords — and generating them means combining the right list with contact data that actually reaches the owner.
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Real Estate Cold Calling Scripts (Investor & Wholesaling)
Investor cold-calling scripts follow one arc — confirm the owner, disarm, ask about selling, handle the first no, and set the follow-up — and they only produce deals when dialed against phone numbers that actually reach property owners.
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Real Estate Text Message Scripts
Real estate text message scripts are short, permission-seeking messages sent to property owners and leads — and unlike a call script, they only work against numbers that can actually receive a text, which makes line type the field the whole channel depends on.
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Virtual Wholesaling
Virtual wholesaling is running a wholesaling operation in markets you don't live in — sourcing, negotiating and assigning contracts remotely — which makes it, more than any other strategy, a pure data-and-phone business. With no door to knock, a dead number is a dead lead, so the trace is the operation: 1 credit, 2¢, charged only on a match.
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How to Find Cash Buyers for Wholesaling
Cash buyers leave a public trail — deeds recorded with no mortgage attached — so building a buyers list means mining transaction data for repeat cash purchasers in your ZIP codes, then skip tracing the LLCs they buy through to reach the people behind them.
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Motivated Seller Keywords
Motivated seller keywords are the PPC and SEO terms — "sell my house fast," "we buy houses," "avoid foreclosure" — investors bid on to reach distressed owners; the same owners are reachable directly from public-record lists and skip tracing, without paying per click.
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Real Estate Leads Without Cold Calling
Direct mail, SMS, PPC audiences, and driving for dollars all generate real-estate leads without a single cold call — but every one of those channels still depends on having a current, correct way to reach the property owner.
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Free Skip Tracing
Free skip tracing means finding a property owner's contact information without paying a per-record fee — hand-searching county assessor records, voter rolls and free people-search sites, one record at a time. Ava Data has no free tier: it charges 1 credit (2¢) per matched phone and nothing at all on a miss.
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Buy Box (Real Estate)
A buy box is the specific set of acquisition criteria — property type, price range, condition, location, and deal structure — an investor uses to filter which deals are worth pursuing, so effort goes only into leads that actually fit.
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Non-Disclosure States (Real Estate)
A non-disclosure state is one where a property's final sale price never becomes public record, which makes comping a deal harder and shifts investor list-building toward the distress and equity signals that stay public everywhere.
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