What TCPA actually says about texting a skip-traced list

In this guide

1. 01What does the TCPA actually say about texting a skip-traced list?
2. 02What counts as consent — and what a list vendor cannot sell you
3. 03What does the Do Not Call registry actually cover?
4. 04Is "I'll buy your house" even a telephone solicitation?
5. 05What is the exposure, per message?
6. 06Which state laws go further than the TCPA?
7. 0710DLC is not the law — and it will stop you first
8. 08What should you actually do before the next send?

What does the TCPA actually say about texting a skip-traced list?

There is no consent on a skip-traced list. Consent under the TCPA runs from a specific person to a specific caller — a number a data vendor pulled out of a public record is not consent, and neither is a checkbox somebody clicked on a website you have never heard of. That is not a gap you can close with better copy. So the useful question is not whether you have consent. It is which rules apply when you don't.

Four of them do, and they live in different places. Two are in the statute, two are in the FCC's implementing rules, and they carry very different amounts of risk.

What counts as consent — and what a list vendor cannot sell you

Consent matters here for a narrower reason than most people assume. The TCPA's definition of a "telephone solicitation" already excludes a call or message sent with the person's prior express invitation or permission — so real consent takes you out of the Do Not Call rules entirely, rather than acting as a defense inside them. That is why it is worth a lot when you have it, and worth arguing about when a vendor claims to have gotten it for you.

In late 2023 the FCC tried to tighten what a lead generator could pass along: consent had to be given to one identified seller at a time, and the calls had to be logically and topically related to the interaction that produced it. On January 24, 2025 the Eleventh Circuit vacated both requirements in Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, holding the agency had rewritten "prior express consent" past its authority. Read that carefully before you celebrate: it removed a strict FCC gloss on what consent means. It did not create consent where a person never gave any. On a skip-traced list there was no disclosure, no form, and no interaction at all — there is nothing for the ruling to help with.

Established business relationship — the exemption agents have and investors don't

The other exemption is the established business relationship, defined at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(f)(5). It runs eighteen months from a purchase or transaction, and three months from an inquiry or application. An agent texting a past client who closed fourteen months ago is standing somewhere very different from an investor texting a stranger whose number came off a county record.

Two limits worth writing on the wall. First, the relationship ends the moment that person asks your company to stop — the rule says a seller-specific do-not-call request terminates it even if they keep doing business with you. Second, an EBR is an exemption from "telephone solicitation." It is not an exemption from paragraph (d), which makes you keep your own do-not-call list regardless of how warm the relationship is.

What does the Do Not Call registry actually cover?

The rule prohibits initiating any telephone solicitation to a residential subscriber who has registered their number on the national registry. The part investors miss is 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(e), which applies both the registry rule and the internal do-not-call rule to telephone solicitations and text messages sent to wireless numbers. A personal cell counts. In the Ninth Circuit case discussed below, the plaintiff had registered her personal cell phone in 2004 and the claim rose or fell on that.

What the registry does not cover is a shorter list than people hope:

• Numbers nobody registered — which you cannot know without checking.
• People who gave you prior express invitation or permission in writing.
• People you have an established business relationship with, until they ask you to stop.
• Whether the number still belongs to the person you traced. Reassigned numbers are a completely separate problem with a separate federal database and its own safe harbor, at 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(m). A stale skip-trace and a reassigned cell are the same fact pattern.

And the registry defense is not "I didn't know." The safe harbor at § 64.1200(c)(2) is conditional: written procedures, trained personnel, records, and a version of the registry obtained from the administrator no more than 31 days before the message goes out. Access is a subscription for sellers and telemarketers through the FTC's portal — it is not a file you download once and reuse for a year.

Your own do-not-call list is a separate obligation

Paragraph (d) is the one almost nobody running a list has actually read. It requires written procedures and trained personnel before you make a single solicitation. It requires that a request to stop be honored within a reasonable time, not to exceed ten business days from receipt. It requires that the request be honored for five years. And § 64.1200(d)(4) requires that you provide the name of the individual caller, the name of the entity on whose behalf the message is sent, and a phone number or address where that entity can be reached.

That illustrative message names a person, names the entity, and gives a stop path in one segment. Understand exactly what it buys you: it satisfies an identification requirement. It does not create consent, and it does not get you past the registry. Identification is the floor, not the defense.

The FCC also rewrote revocation in a February 2024 order: a person can revoke consent in any reasonable manner, and the revocation has to be honored within a reasonable time not to exceed ten business days. One narrow piece of that package — whether a stop on one kind of message also kills unrelated messages from you — has been delayed more than once and is currently set for January 31, 2027. Do not build a process that depends on the delay. The delay is the only part of this that has been reliably temporary.

Is "I'll buy your house" even a telephone solicitation?

This is the genuinely unsettled question, and it is the one your whole exposure turns on. The statute defines a telephone solicitation as "the initiation of a telephone call or message for the purpose of encouraging the purchase or rental of, or investment in, property, goods, or services" — 47 U.S.C. § 227(a)(4). The investor's argument writes itself: you are not encouraging anyone to buy anything. You are asking to buy from them.

That argument has real support. The Seventh Circuit read the phrase as requiring a purchase by the recipient in Hulce v. Zipongo Inc. (2025), and when the Ninth Circuit took up a "we buy houses" case both sides accepted that reading, so the court did not disturb it. If your entire business is buying houses with your own money and nothing at all happens to the people who say no, you have something to stand on.

Then came Coffey v. Fast Easy Offer, LLC, decided June 4, 2026 and published. The plaintiff, an Arizona homeowner who put her cell number on the registry in 2004, alleged she got at least six calls and two texts in the fall of 2024 from an employee of a company whose model is buying homes below market. The complaint also alleged that homes the company did not buy became leads for brokerage services shared with a Keller Williams brokerage, and that nine out of ten respondents were routed that way. The district court dismissed: not solicitations. The Ninth Circuit reversed.

The "purpose" at issue is not, on a plain read, the purpose of the call or message, but instead of the "initiation" of that call or message.

— Coffey v. Fast Easy Offer, LLC, No. 25-4066 (9th Cir. June 4, 2026)

The panel's point is grammatical and, once you see it, hard to argue with: "for the purpose of" modifies the initiation of the message, not the message. So a court looks at why you sent it, not only at what it said. Citing its earlier decision in Chesbro v. Best Buy Stores, the panel repeated that neither the statute nor the regulations require an explicit mention of a good or service where the implication is clear from context. Because one alleged purpose of initiating the messages was to sell brokerage services, that was enough to state a claim.

What is the exposure, per message?

Section 227(c)(5) gives a private right of action to a person who received "more than one telephone call within any 12-month period by or on behalf of the same entity" in violation of the regulations, with damages equal to the greater of actual monetary loss or up to $500 per violation. A court may increase the award to not more than three times that amount for a willful or knowing violation. The autodialer track at § 227(b)(3) is worded slightly differently — $500 per violation, same trebling — and does not carry the more-than-one-call gate.

Sit with that threshold for a second, because it is the uncomfortable part. The gate is more than one message in twelve months. Follow-up cadence — the exact discipline that makes a cold list produce anything — is what converts a single unwanted message into a claim. The first text is not the liability. The fourth one is.

Two more things about the shape of the risk. No regulator has to be involved: this is a private suit, and it is routinely filed as a putative class action, which is where a per-message number stops being small. And courts split on what "willful or knowing" requires — some read it as knowing you placed the call rather than knowing it was unlawful. Do not plan around the generous reading.

Which state laws go further than the TCPA?

The TCPA is a floor. Several states run their own telephone solicitation statutes on top of it — Florida, Oklahoma and Washington are the ones that generate volume. They score on where the phone is, not where you are, and a skip-traced list is national by construction. You do not get to pick your jurisdiction; the list picks it for you.

Florida's Telephone Solicitation Act is the one to know. It reaches texts sent using an automated system, and it carries $500 per call. A 2023 amendment narrowed the private claim for text messages: a plaintiff now has to have replied STOP to the number that texted them and then received another message within the following fifteen days. That is a real narrowing. It is not a repeal, and it turns your opt-out handling into the fact that decides the case.

10DLC is not the law — and it will stop you first

Keep these two things in separate drawers. The TCPA and the FCC rules are law: breaking them gets you sued. 10DLC is a carrier program: you register your brand and your campaign through The Campaign Registry, and the content and consent expectations come from CTIA's Messaging Principles and Best Practices. Breaking those does not get you sued. It gets you filtered — messages that quietly stop arriving, a number that still looks fine on your screen and reaches nobody. The registration side is its own subject: 10DLC registration for real estate.

In practice the carrier rulebook bites earlier and harder than the statute, because it is enforced automatically on every message rather than by a plaintiff who has to find you. It is also stricter about opt-outs. CTIA asks that STOP be honored along with its ordinary-language cousins — stop, end, cancel, quit, unsubscribe, "please opt me out" — and that capitalization, punctuation and small variations not defeat the request. Compare that to the federal ceiling of ten business days and it is obvious which one is setting your actual standard.

What should you actually do before the next send?

Nothing on this list is expensive. All of it is boring, and boring is the whole defense — both federal safe harbors are built out of paperwork you either did or did not do before the message went out.

1. Subscribe to the national registry and scrub against it. Sellers and telemarketers access it through the FTC's telemarketer portal. The safe harbor wants a version pulled no more than 31 days before the send, so this is a recurring job, not a one-time file.
2. Write the procedures down and train whoever sends. Both safe harbors assume a written policy and trained people. An undocumented policy is not a policy — it is a thing you meant to do.
3. Keep one suppression list and let every path check it. One-to-one threads, campaigns, bulk sends and auto-replies all reading the same list. Per-campaign opt-out settings are how a stop gets lost.
4. Honor a stop faster than the rule requires. Ten business days is the ceiling, not the target. Your carriers already expect immediate, and immediate is also the version you can prove.
5. Keep the record for five years. § 64.1200(d)(6). The record is what turns "we honor opt-outs" from a claim into evidence.
6. Identify yourself in the first message. Your name, the company's name, and a way to reach the company — § 64.1200(d)(4).
7. Send in the recipient's hours, not yours. 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time where the phone is. On a national list that means a send window, not a send button.
8. Register 10DLC before you scale, not after the filtering starts. By the time you can see the delivery problem you have already taught the carriers something about your traffic.

Two honest caveats to close on. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — it is a reading list with the citations attached, which is the part most posts on this subject leave out. And this area moves: the Ninth Circuit decided Coffey in June, the Eleventh Circuit vacated the FCC's consent rule in January 2025, and one piece of the revocation rule is still on hold into 2027. Every source below is free to read. Read the ones that apply to how you actually work.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• 47 U.S.C. § 227 — Telephone Consumer Protection Act (Cornell LII)
• 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200 — FCC delivery restrictions, do-not-call and consent rules (Cornell LII)
• Coffey v. Fast Easy Offer, LLC, No. 25-4066 (9th Cir. June 4, 2026) — opinion PDF
• Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, 592 U.S. 395 (2021) — the autodialer definition
• Insurance Marketing Coalition Ltd. v. FCC, No. 24-10277 (11th Cir. Jan. 24, 2025)
• FCC — Strengthening the Ability of Consumers To Stop Robocalls (Federal Register, 2024)
• FCC — CGB extends the effective date of the TCPA consent revocation rule
• FTC — National Do Not Call Registry access for sellers and telemarketers
• Reassigned Numbers Database
• The Campaign Registry — 10DLC brand and campaign registration
• CTIA — Messaging Principles and Best Practices (PDF)
• The Florida Bar Journal — the Florida Telephone Solicitation Act