Will your service tell me if somebody lives at an address?

Question

I am cleaning old lists and I wonder if your address search also clarifies who is living at an address? For example, whether a person from 1980's is still at such-and-such address, or is someone else living in that house?

Answer

Our address verification services will let you know if a specific address is real and deliverable, but it doesn't confirm who is living at the address. Verifying occupants is quite difficult to do with a high degree of accuracy. It is not a service that we perform.

The US Postal Service maintains a list of people who have submitted a change of address form. They call it the National Change Of Address (NCOA) registry. There are a number of services that will perform NCOA checking for you on an address list. Simply perform a Google search to determine the best provider that meets your unique requirements.

Why we don't offer NCOA services

We used to provide NCOA data. We stopped because it doesn't provide any type of assurance that the person is still at that address. It only mentions whether they filled out the NCOA form or not. There are many people (and businesses) that intentionally do not fill out a change of address form because they don't want the junk mail to follow them.

Further, NCOA data only lasts a few years and is contingent upon the resident or company to fill out the form, do it correctly, etc. Ultimately, we dropped the service because it was not providing the value that our customers expected.

While our address verification is highly accurate (and easy to use), we are unable to provide information about who is currently living at an address. However, a lot of large businesses will come back under the "Firm Name" field for addresses we verify.