Skip Tracing Evicted Tenants to Garnish Wages and Collect Debt

General Landlording & Rental Properties
5yFollow

Skip Tracing Evicted Tenants to Garnish Wages and Collect Debt

Cody F.
Rental Property Investor · Auburn, AL · Member since 2018 · 50 posts · 20 votes

We've had several evictions over the years and have gotten judgements against the tenants. You can collect on money that is owed by garnishing wages if need be, but you first need to find out where that person works.  This is where skip tracing comes into play. 

I have found several websites that could be useful, but I'm wondering if anyone on here has a tested method or service that they trust and use.  I know there are websites and companies that you can use for debt collecting but I have a feeling they are a waste of time. They charge money to send bills and notices in the mail, and it costs to keep sending those notices that usually just get thrown in the trash.  

We have more than 10k in debt at this point that we incurred from evictions, so it would be nice to just run some names through a database every other month or so to hopefully find the employer to collect on some of that loss we incurred. 

I've found a few candidates for skip tracing and finding employers:

-Microbilt.com 

-Accurint.com

The sites above seem to be the most professional and legitimate way to go about it. 

Other sites that might be useful but seem like they won't give you full detailed info include

-TLO.com  (Transunion)

-Spokeo.com 

-Beenverified.com

-Infotracer.com

-Truepeoplesearch.com

I used infotracer and it wasn't very helpful, but still got some decent information that may be useful, Truepeoplesearch.com was pretty useful and was free, it linked to beenverified if you wanted more detailed information that you would have to pay for. 

I'm interested to hear if anyone else is working on this same problem and has had any luck solving it, I would love to hear if you found a website or service that really worked for you.  I feel like around these parts here in Alabama there are a lot of old landlords that aren't tech savvy, so when they have bad tenants they don't get reported to any credit bureau or database, these bad tenants then get to keep on going from rental to rental destroying property and not paying rent because they aren't getting any consequences.  

1Reply
26 views

2 Replies

Jump to latestLatest
  • Cheyenne Nafe
    Huntsville, AL · Member since 2021 · 41 posts · 15 votes
    5y

    @Cody F. Hey from Huntsville,  I believe that those sites you listed as legitimate above would work great! I am sorry to hear that happened to you. Please reach out if you ever wanna go over the industry woes and see what all we can do about it!!!! Alabama has a strong investor circle and I believe things can change with a gathered movement  

    0Reply
  • Zachary C.
    Property Manager · Huntsville, AL · Member since 2015 · 251 posts · 129 votes
    5y

    From what I hear IRBSearch is another one to consider. I don't know what the requirements are for signup on these programs (some require certain company licensing info and such, possibly depending on the search quality level). If you can find a collection agency whos fee is collection based this might be an alternative to coming out of pocket on the front end. Some people buy the debt judgements if you just want to offload it for a percentage of the judgement value and then they have to worry about actually collecting is (not sure large the debt has to be for this to work, aggregate or otherwise). Private investigators generally have an account with one of those premium services like LexisNexis' Accurint or IRB search; if they have the unlimited search version their entire cost is sunk. You could compile a database of the people you are trying to track down and the type of info you will pay for and then call around to a bunch of different ones and see what you can workout, whether it is running the list monthly for a fee, or some fee that is results based; point is if their software is sunk costs they should be able to negotiate a decent deal where their time is covered (it could be something to fill in periods of slow work for them with little time and effort). Between those three options its just finding the right one in terms of time you are will to hold the debt and the fee you will pay to get it collected (of the fee you will get for assigning it to someone else to collect it).

    0Reply
Join the conversationCreate a free account to reply, vote on answers and follow this thread.
Log InJoin for Free