Have you spotted a new face in the house across the street? You might want to check online or consult public records before heading over to their house with a home-baked pie. A little online research can make it easier to connect, get their name right, and even find things you might have in common. This could also apply to the neighbors that you already know!
Alternatively, you might learn enough about the person’s background to keep your distance and avoid their house entirely. Or you may just have a weird feeling about a person and you’re thinking twice about letting your child go to their house to play with their kids. Perhaps you’re looking for a new house and can’t make up your mind between streets in the same neighborhood. In short, you have powerful tools at your fingertips to ask “who are my neighbors?” and get meaningful answers.
Who Are My Neighbors?
Your first thought, whenever you want information, is probably to hit Google (or perhaps an alternative search engine). Unfortunately, a Google search for a street address won’t usually turn up much, like perhaps old real estate listings from the last time that house was on the market. Which, while interesting (we’re all curious about how much neighboring houses are worth!), is likely not the type of information you’re looking for.
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If you want more detailed information about a specific person living on your street — a full name, a cell phone number, an email address, or what have you — Google may come up short. That doesn’t mean you can’t find this kind of information, it just means you’ll need to put in a bit more effort. Much of what you’ll want to know is out there in the form of publicly accessible records, so it’s largely a question of figuring out which records and how to access them.
How To Use Public Records to Research Your Neighbors
Everyone’s entitled to search public records for information held by city, state, or federal government agencies. The process is far from seamless, though, and you’ll often have to track down information across records held by different (or multiple!) departments in a given state. Then there’s the question of what you’re looking for. If you just want to know a given neighbor’s name, for example, it’s on property records and those are easy to find.
If you’re safety-minded and want to vet your neighbors (or future neighbors) for potential threats, that’s a bit more challenging. If you want to check if a registered sex offender is living on your street, the National Sex Offender Public Website tracks and logs the 900,000 or so registered sex offenders in the US.
For other forms of criminal history, a good place to start your search is the National Center for State Courts, which maintains a database of criminal records that have not been sealed or expunged. You can also look those up on a state-by-state basis, though accessibility to criminal records varies. In some states, like Minnesota, information is relatively thorough and easy to access. In others, like New York, you will need an exact name match and will have to pay a search fee.
Find Out Who Lives on My Street Using Spokeo’s People Search Tools
Searching up your neighbors through public records can be a real slog, eating up significant quantities of time (and often money as well). There are also some serious limitations to what you can learn about your neighbors from public records. They can tell you a lot of dry facts, which admittedly are often useful, but have little to say about who they are as people.
Spokeo provides a thoroughly practical solution to both of those issues. Using our Reverse Address Search takes just seconds — less time than you’d usually spend navigating a state’s or county’s website just to find where to search — to pull together data from billions of publicly available sources and present it in one neatly formatted package.
How To Do A Reverse Address Search
To get the full picture of a person who lives on your street — or one three streets over, for that matter — you only need the address. Here’s how it works:
- Type the address into our reverse address search tool.
- The results will show you the current legal owner of the property, and also the current residents (they aren’t necessarily the same).
- Scroll through the report to see details about the property itself, if that’s of interest to you. Then you can scroll down to the list of current and former residents of that address, and click or tap on the name (or the corresponding “View Details” button) for whichever one you want to learn more about.
These results can contain a huge variety of information about the people who call that address home, including the names of each person registered at that house (although it may not be up to date with any new neighbor’s information). It may also include:
- Family Info
- Marital Status
- Contact Info (Phone Number and Email Address)
- Pics & Profiles from Social Networks
- Criminal Records/Arrest Records/Sex Offenses (Additional Fees Apply)
Depending on your goals, you could continue along your block and the surrounding streets, searching each address in turn, until you’ve vetted everyone in the neighborhood. Or, if your motivation was purely social, you might want to dig a bit more in order to have a fuller picture of one or two specific neighbors. The results of your address search can help with that.
Additional Searches Using Spokeo
The results of your address search will arm you with everything you need to dig deeper, if you want to. Searching your neighbors’ full names, one or more phone numbers, or email addresses in turn will bring up additional information that might not come up in the address search, including everything from additional phone numbers to their social media accounts.
Glancing at their posts on social media and special-interest forums will tell you a lot about their attitudes, interests, and outlook on life in general. Based on that, you can infer which of your neighbors are likeliest to be “friend material,” and find some common ground that you can leverage as the basis of a new friendship. That’s one of the challenges of moving (finding friends in a new city, as an adult, can be tricky), and Spokeo can help tilt the odds in your favor.
Search Results are Easy, Real Life Can be Messier
After a few of those searches, you’ll have a very good picture of the people around you. Armed with that information you can set about getting acquainted, and have some guidance about which of them are likely to mingle well and which — on the other hand — are likely to butt heads. In other words, your summer block party is about to get a whole lot less awkward.
If you went through this exercise with the intention of screening your neighbors for safety reasons, rather than social ones, you should now be as informed as public information can make you. There aren’t any guarantees in life, but at this point even the most cautious person could feel fairly confident about getting to know the neighbors.
Of course, in real life, people can’t neatly be pigeonholed in ways that show up in a search. Over time, as you get to know the neighbors, you’ll probably “click” with some you didn’t expect, or fail to connect with someone you thought you would. That’s why, no matter how much research you do in advance, ultimately you still need to put yourself out there and meet people. It’s easier for some than others, but it’s the connections you make with the people around you that turn houses full of strangers into a warm, supportive neighborhood.