You have your eye on some potentially hot real estate deals, but the owners are nowhere to be found. Maybe they skipped town to avoid paying some debts and they don’t want to be tracked down. Maybe they just moved away and left the property vacant because they don’t want to spend the money on improvements to make it rentable. Maybe a long-lost rich relative found them and whisked them away to live in a castle in Scotland. The point is, you never know until you start looking.  

It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, especially when it comes to real estate investing. The competition isn’t friendly, and as soon as a seller realizes that they have something of value, making a favorable deal gets way harder. Having critical data at your fingertips could mean the difference between securing a gold mine or letting a property slip through your fingers. One way to give yourself the best chance of closing a deal is to use call tracking software. In fact, in the competitive real estate investing landscape, not having call tracking software puts you at a serious disadvantage that no amount of hard work can overcome.

That abandoned property is just sitting there, waiting to be purchased, rehabbed, flipped, and turned for a profit. That deal could be your next vacation. At last count, about 1.4 million of these vacant properties exist in the United States, thus giving investors plenty of opportunity to track down an owner, develop a rapport, make an offer, negotiate, and close the deal—and earn that profit.

In 1968, an inventor named Ted Paraskevakos began work on a technology that, five decades later, would evolve to become indispensable to REI professionals. See, this electrical and communications engineer (please don’t make us try typing his name again; we’re not even sure we got it right the first time …) developed something that everybody who uses a phone—not just real estate investors—takes for granted today: caller ID.

The worst sound an REI professional can hear when talking with a prospect who has just called isn’t “Don’t call again” or “Go to hell!” or “I’m not interested in selling” or a myriad of other phrases you’ve likely encountered over the years. Yes, those suck, but the worst sound is simple and devastating: a click.

You have the addresses. You have the names. You have the charming personality, focused determination, and negotiating skills. All you are missing are the right digits.

Direct mail and email contacts can help you make inroads with the owner of a distressed property, but nothing beats a good old-fashioned phone call. Interacting with a live human in real time remains the best way for prospects to build a rapport with REI professionals looking to buy their properties (and vice versa). So when you can’t find the phone number associated with a property owner or the property itself, you begin your endeavor already at a ridiculous disadvantage.