Skip Tracing

What it means

Skip tracing started as a private-investigator term for finding people who had "skipped town." Today, it's a core workflow for real-estate investors, debt collectors, repo agents, and B2B sales teams who need to reach an individual whose direct contact info isn't publicly listed.

A modern skip trace takes a known input — typically a name plus a property address, or a name plus a last-known city/state — and returns the most recent verified phone numbers and email addresses associated with that person, along with related individuals such as spouses, parents, and known associates.

Quality varies enormously between providers. Two metrics matter:

• Match rate — what percentage of inputs return any contact info at all.
• Connect rate — what percentage of returned phone numbers are actually answered by the target person, not disconnected, wrong-number, or routed to a relative who hasn't lived with them in a decade.

Legacy providers optimize for match rate by serving the same stale records to thousands of customers. The result: high match rates on paper, weak connect rates in practice.

How Ava Data handles skip tracing

You give Ava Data a name plus an address (or city and state), and we return the most recent verified phones, emails, and — on Deep Search — the related-persons graph. Our underlying identity graph refreshes every 24 hours, so phone numbers that disconnected yesterday are flagged today rather than next quarter.

Two ways to use it:

• The dashboard. Sign in, type a name and address into the search bar, and get the contact card on screen — no code. This is the right path for sales reps, acquisition managers, and anyone working leads one at a time.
• The API. Send the same fields as JSON and get the same data back, ready to drop straight into your CRM or dialer. This is the right path for developers and ops teams enriching records in bulk.

Pricing is per match either way: 1 credit for a phone-only Standard Lookup, 2 credits for phone + email, and 10 credits for a Deep Search that also returns the related-persons graph. You only pay when we return a match.

For developers: example API call

If you'd rather click than code, the Ava Data dashboard returns the same data without a single line of JSON. The snippet below is for teams wiring Ava Data into a CRM, dialer, or AI pipeline.

{
  "firstName": "John",
  "lastName": "Smith",
  "address": "123 Main St",
  "city": "Austin",
  "state": "TX",
  "returns": ["phone"]
}

{
  "matchFound": true,
  "creditsCharged": 1,
  "subject": {
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "phones": [
      { "number": "5125551234", "type": "mobile", "lastSeen": "2026-05-09" }
    ]
  }
}

Related terms

• 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.
• People Search API — A people search API programmatically returns identity and contact information for an individual given a name and a few disambiguating fields — address, city, state, age, or DOB.
• Bulk Skip Tracing — Bulk skip tracing runs a skip trace over a list of records — typically a CSV of names and addresses — and returns matched contact information as a downloadable file or via async API.