Skip tracing your own list vs buying done-for-you leads
Skip tracing is cheap per record and much less cheap per usable phone number, and the gap between those two figures is where the money goes.
What you get from a skip trace
A vendor matches an owner name and address against consumer data and returns phone numbers, often several, of varying age and accuracy. Some are current mobiles, some are landlines nobody answers, some belong to a relative, and some belong to whoever inherited the number.
Hit rates vary hugely by list type and by how good the underlying name and address data was. Entity-owned property is markedly worse, because the owner of record is a company rather than a person.
You pay for every record you submit, including the ones that come back with nothing usable.
What we hand over
A number that has already carried a successful conversation. Not "we believe this is his mobile" — a phone that received a message and replied from it.
That removes the whole failure class: no dead numbers, no wrong person, no paying for a trace that returned a disconnected landline.
When to trace your own
If you already have a list you believe in — a farm area, a niche, records you assembled yourself — tracing it is the right move and nobody else is going to build that list for you.
If you are tracing generic county pulls, you are doing the same work we do, at smaller scale, and paying for the misses. That is the case where buying the outcome is straightforwardly cheaper.
Questions people ask
What hit rate should I expect from skip tracing?
It swings widely with list quality and property type, and any single number quoted as universal is marketing rather than measurement. The figure that matters is not the hit rate but the share of returned numbers that reach the right person — measure that on your own data.
Do you give me more than one number per seller?
You get the number the seller actually replied from. Additional numbers are not useful when the correct one is already proven.
Other comparisons
Every lead on Freedom Leads is a seller who already replied to a text. $5 each, sold once, to one buyer.