IRBsearch describes itself, on its own page for private investigators, as “Built by Investigators, For Investigators.” Read that sentence before you read any comparison, because it is the answer to most of the questions people arrive with. Established in 2001, it sells more than forty individual searches across fifty states and all US territories, drawing on what it describes as “hundreds of billions of records from over ten thousand sources, including all three credit bureaus” — all quoted as published on 23 September 2026. It is a strong product for the professions it names. Whether it is the right product for you is mostly a question of whether you are one of them.
Disclosure: Scout Data is our product and we sell homeowner phone files to call centers. IRBsearch sells investigative searches, so we are adjacent rather than head to head. Treat that entry as a maker’s pitch and the rest as our honest read of IRBsearch’s public pages.
The product, in the order you actually use it
The catalogue is organised into six families of search: people, business, phone, asset, court and licence — everything from an advanced person search and phone finder to bankruptcy, civil and criminal court records, motor vehicle and property holdings, and professional licences. You pick a search, you run it against a subject, you read a report, and the results are “saved for 30 days and are exportable as a PDF, Word Document, or Excel Spreadsheet.”
That workflow is the product, and it is a good one for a case. It is also the reason a call center bounces off it. A floor does not run a search against a subject; it loads a file and dials it. For scale: one Bay Area solar floor Scout Data works with placed 348,858 dials on 74,913 records in the three weeks to 18 September 2026. There is no version of a search-then-report interface that is the right tool for that week, and IRBsearch has never suggested there is.
The six industries on the nav
IRBsearch builds a dedicated page for each audience it wants: private investigators, process servers, legal professionals, repossession agents, bail bondsmen and collections. Solar, roofing and HVAC sales are not among them, and that is not an oversight — access to this data runs through a Compliance Center which, in IRBsearch’s own words, exists because “each state has requirements, based on industry, to allow you to access our data.”
So the first question for a home-services operation is not price or match rate. It is whether the verification process leaves you holding the searches you came for. Ask it early, in writing, and ask specifically which searches remain enabled for your industry — a credentialed platform with its restricted layers switched off is a much smaller product than the one in the demo. The same gate, on the neighbouring platforms, is covered in Tracers alternatives and Accurint alternatives.
What to buy instead, by the job you brought
| The job | What to buy | Why it is the matching shape |
|---|---|---|
| Locate one subject who does not want to be found | Stay on IRBsearch, or compare a bureau-tier platform | Depth per subject is the product — idiCORE vs TLOxp compares the two heavyweights |
| Serve papers or recover an asset | Stay on IRBsearch | Two of the six audiences it builds for; the address-and-sightings stack exists for exactly this |
| Put phones on a list of addresses you already own | A per-record bulk append | Charged per row rather than per lookup — bulk skip tracing does the economics |
| Work out which homeowners are worth calling at all | A signal-built homeowner file | Targeting is upstream of contact data and no search product supplies it |
| Feed a predictive dialer every week without re-dialling dead rows | Scout Data | Owner-matched, DNC-scrubbed rows with dead numbers replaced, priced per record |
Vendor claims on this page are as publicly advertised at the time of writing — confirm current capability and pricing with each vendor, and with our sales team for Scout Data. IRBsearch publishes no rates; what it does publish about plan shapes is in IRBsearch pricing.
The three things a dialing file has that a report does not
- Selection. A report answers questions about a person you have already chosen. A file chooses for you — an ageing roof, a system past its service life, an ownership change, storm exposure last season — and that choice is where the connect rate comes from, long before the phone number does.
- Do-not-call state on every row. An outbound floor’s live compliance obligation is per dial, not per case. DNC compliance for outbound solar covers what that requires and what a dated scrub on delivery is worth.
- Decay handling. Numbers go dead continuously — measured across Scout Data’s own re-enriched paid orders, 1.4% of records went dead within six weeks. A file that is re-verified and replaced on delivery is a different product from a report that was accurate on the day it was pulled and is now three months old in a spreadsheet folder.
The setup that works: keep the seat, change the lane
Nothing here argues for cancelling an investigative account. The floors that run well keep two lanes on purpose. The file feeds the dialer, and one credentialed seat handles the records that genuinely deserve to be worked like cases: the signed customer whose number changed mid-install, the disputed address, the high-value quote that went dark. What changes is that dialer rows stop being routed through a research interface — which is usually the entire saving, and costs nothing to implement.
If the shortlist is still open, the honest map of the whole category — credentialed platforms, list brokers and signal-built homeowner files are three different businesses that answer to three different buyers — is in best skip tracing software, and the buying process for a floor specifically is in call center data providers.
Dial-volume and decay figures are Scout Data’s own, quoted with their samples and windows and listed on our benchmarks page. IRBsearch claims are quotations from its public pages, read 23 September 2026.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best IRBsearch alternatives?
For the same job — investigative search on a named subject — the alternatives are the other credentialed platforms: TLOxp, idiCORE, Accurint and Tracers. For a different job that people often bring to IRBsearch by mistake, appending phones to a list you already own, a per-record bulk append is the matching shape. And for a call center that needs to be told which homeowners to dial in the first place, Scout Data sells a built homeowner file rather than a search.
Is IRBsearch good for call center lead lists?
No, and it does not claim to be. IRBsearch describes itself as “Built by Investigators, For Investigators” and builds industry pages for private investigators, process servers, legal professionals, repossession agents, bail bondsmen and collections. Its catalogue is organised as individual searches and reports, with results “saved for 30 days and exportable as a PDF, Word Document, or Excel Spreadsheet.” That is a research product. A dialer consumes a file of thousands of rows, which is a different object.
What is IRBsearch?
IRBsearch is an investigative search platform for the legal and recovery professions. Its own pages, read on 23 September 2026, say it was established in 2001, offers “access to more than forty individual searches” across “fifty states and all US territories”, and draws on “hundreds of billions of records from over ten thousand sources, including all three credit bureaus”. Access runs through a Compliance Center that verifies the business, because state requirements for the data vary by industry.
Can I export IRBsearch results into a dialer?
Its catalogue page states that searches and reports are “saved for 30 days and are exportable as a PDF, Word Document, or Excel Spreadsheet”, read on 23 September 2026. A spreadsheet export exists, so a small result set can be moved. What is absent is the thing a dialing operation runs on: a continuously refreshed file of targeted homeowner records, deduplicated against what you already dialled and DNC-scrubbed on delivery. Scout Data ships that shape; an investigative platform ships reports.