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

Question

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

Answer

Our address verification services will let you know whether a specific address is valid and deliverable, but they don't confirm who is living there. Verifying occupants is quite difficult to do with a high degree of accuracy. It isn’t 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) who intentionally don’t 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 on the resident or company completing the form correctly, etc. Ultimately, we dropped the service because it wasn’t providing the value that our customers expected.

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