How to skip trace property owners by parcel number (APN) or address

Tax delinquent rolls, absentee owner pulls, code violation exports, and most county downloads have one thing in common. They arrive with a parcel number, a situs address, and almost nothing you can act on. No owner name you can trust, and no idea whether the person on the deed still lives there or bought the place in 1998 and moved two states away.

Bulk property search takes that file and fills in the rest. You upload the parcel numbers (or the addresses), and every row that matches comes back with the owners on record, what they paid and when, what the county says the place is worth, the tax figure, and the mortgage sitting on it. This guide covers the columns you get, how to set the file up, the screens you click through, what it costs, and how to turn a match into a phone call.

What you get back for each parcel

A matched property returns 21 columns. They break into six groups.

A few of those do most of the filtering work. Owner Occupied separates the people living in the house from the ones you have to reach somewhere else. Purchase Date and Purchase Price tell you how long they have held it and what they are into it for. Mortgage Amount read against Assessed Value gives you a rough equity picture without pulling a title report.

Be realistic about the fields. Not every match fills all 21. Mortgage Rate, School District, and Lot Size come back empty more often than the owner name does, and older records are thinner across the board. The row still counts as one match and one credit.

APN or address: what your file needs

A property row needs one of two things:

• A parcel number (APN) on its own, or
• An address plus city plus state. Zip is optional and it tightens the match, so include it when you have it.

That is the whole requirement. If a row carries both an APN and an address, the parcel number is used first, because it points at exactly one piece of land and an address string can be written six ways. When you pick Property Search in the wizard, a "Your file needs: ..." line prints on screen, so you can check the file against it before you upload.

Every other column in your file rides along untouched. Keep your lead ID, the county name, the list source, your notes field, whatever you use to join results back into your own system. Those come back in the download grouped under "Your uploaded data" and they are checked by default.

Step by step

1. Start a bulk upload and choose Property Search

Open the bulk upload wizard. The first screen asks what kind of search this is: person, property, business, or phone. Property Search sets the file requirements and the output columns for the whole job, so getting step 0 right saves you a re-upload.

The bulk upload wizard search type chooser with Property Search selected

2. Map the parcel number or the address

Upload the file and the mapper reads your header row. The property mapping screen shows two groups: a parcel number field, and an address group with address, city, state, and zip. Fill in one group or the other. Headers like APN, Parcel ID, ParcelNumber, and Situs Address get auto-suggested and you confirm them. The mapper remembers layouts you have confirmed before, so the second file from the same county maps itself.

Property column mapping showing the parcel number field and the separate address, city, state and zip group

3. Review the credit estimate

Before anything runs you get a credit estimate. Read it as a ceiling, not a bill: it assumes every row hits. Rows that come back empty are refunded to your balance automatically when the job finishes, and you do not have to ask anyone for that.

Credit estimate shown before the property job runs, with row count and maximum cost

4. Download the columns you actually use

The job lands in your bulk history with a status chip. When it flips to complete, open Customize download, pick the columns you want, drag them into the order your CRM or mail house expects, and choose CSV or XLSX. Save that arrangement as a template and set it as your default, and every future property job comes out already shaped.

Finished property results in Excel showing owner, owner occupied, assessed value and mortgage columns

Skip trace by parcel number: pricing

One ladder covers every search type. You pay per successful match, one credit per hit.

Parcels that do not match cost nothing. There is no subscription, no minimum order, and no contract, and credits never expire, so whatever is left from a 500 row test carries into the 40,000 row run. New customers get a 100% match on the first deposit. Full details are on the pricing page.

From property match to phone call

A property match gives you the owner. It does not give you a phone number. Getting to a dial is a second pass, and it takes about two minutes to set up.

In the property results, Property Owner1 and Property Owner2 are the names on record, and Owner Occupied tells you whether the property address is a sensible place to reach them. Split the owner name into first and last, pair it with an address, and you have exactly what a person search needs: first name, last name, address, city, state, and zip. Upload that as a second job with person search picked on step 0. A person match returns up to five phone numbers, email addresses, a mailing address, and identity columns.

You are billed per match on both passes, and misses on either one are refunded. If what you end up holding is a bare column of numbers with no names attached, the bulk phone append guide runs the trace in the other direction. All four search types are on the homepage.

Common problems

Excel eats your APNs. This is the biggest single cause of a bad property job. Open a county CSV by double clicking it and Excel drops the leading zero from 0123-456-789 and turns a long numeric parcel into 1.23457E+11. Both are now the wrong number and neither will match. Import through Data, then From Text/CSV, and set the parcel column to Text before you finish. If a file is already mangled, go back to the original download; a formatted-away zero does not come back.

Reformatted parcel numbers. Counties write APNs differently, with dashes, dots, spaces, or nothing at all. Send the number the way the assessor writes it. Stripping punctuation to make a multi-county file look tidy breaks rows that were fine.

Address rows with no state. An address and a city are not enough on their own. State is required in the address group, and adding zip narrows a common street name in a metro that has four of them.

PO box mailing addresses. A PO box is fine on a mailer and useless as person search input, because no household is attached to it. For those rows, use the situs address from the property match instead, or work them by name.

Hit rates move with the source of the list, and a clean APN column is the best input you can hand a property search. If your lists start as parcel numbers and end as phone calls, Bulk Skip Trace covers that path with no contract, no seat fee, and billing only on the rows that come back with something on them. Create an account, deposit what you want your first test to cost, and run a sample file today.