Hard-to-Reach Living Situations

Find Someone Inside a Gated Community

Almost everything written about this treats the gate as the whole difficulty, and then quietly explains how to talk your way through it. That advice is both unnecessary and, in our hands, off limits. A gated community is nearly always an ordinary platted subdivision with ordinary recorded deeds. The county holds the parcel, the owner and the mailing address exactly as it holds them for a house on a public street. The record is open. Only the driveway is shut.

Recorded documents and corporate filings, not gate tricks No pretext calls to guards or management Safety declines applied before any work starts
415.21Cal. Civ. Proc.: access for lawful service, staffed gates only
48.031(7)Fla. Stat.: unannounced entry for a person serving process
720.303(5)Fla. Stat.: guest gate records closed even to members
14.090Nev. Rev. Stat.: gate-only residences have their own rule

The Short Version

Separate the two things the word “gated” is hiding. Finding out who owns a home behind a gate is an ordinary records task: the subdivision was platted, the plat was recorded, every conveyance since was recorded, and the assessor bills somebody at a mailing address. None of that is sealed, and no gate touches any of it. The association itself is usually a registered non-profit corporation with officers and a registered agent on file with a Secretary of State, which gives you a lawful, published point of contact. What the gate genuinely obstructs is standing in front of the door – a service-of-process and physical-contact question that belongs to a lawyer, a sheriff or a licensed process server in the relevant state, and that several states have written statutes about. The trap is the middle: the owner of record may be a landlord, an LLC or a trust, and the person actually living there may appear in no deed index at all.

Watch: The Record Is Open, the Driveway Is Not

Why the parcel behind a gate is indexed like any other, and where the real obstruction sits.

Video guide

The Deed Does Not Know There Is a Gate

Recording law makes no exception for private streets, guardhouses or entry codes. It never has.

Begin with how one of these places came into existence, because that history is what puts everything on the public record. A developer bought acreage, drew a subdivision plan, cut it into numbered lots and recorded the plat with the county. That recorded plat is a public instrument. It carries the lot and block numbers, the dimensions, the easements and the layout of the internal streets, and any member of the public can obtain a copy of it. Every lot the developer then sold was conveyed by a deed, and every one of those deeds was recorded in the same county index as a deed to a bungalow on a public road. There is no separate index for gated subdivisions. There is no confidential register. The wall went up afterwards, and it went up around houses whose paperwork was already sitting in a courthouse.

The assessor’s side works identically. Somebody has to be billed for property tax on lot 47, so the assessor carries a parcel number, an assessed value, a legal description, an owner name and – the part people underestimate – a mailing address for the tax bill. That mailing address is often the single most useful line in the whole file, because it is the address the owner actually wants post to reach, which is not necessarily the address of the house. When those two differ on a parcel inside a gate, the difference is telling you something rather than defeating you.

Then there is a layer specific to communities like this one, and it is a matter of public record too. The covenants, conditions and restrictions – the CC&Rs everybody complains about and few people read – are a recorded instrument encumbering the land. They have to be recorded to bind subsequent purchasers, which is the whole point of them. So are the declaration, the amendments, and in most places the plat notes governing the private streets. If you want to know whether the roads inside are privately held by the association, whether there is an easement for utilities or emergency access, or what the association is empowered to do, the answer is in a recorded document you can obtain without asking anybody inside for permission.

Say plainly what follows from this, because the ranking pages on this query never do. The gate has no bearing whatsoever on the locate. A person searching a county recorder’s index for a name is not stopped, slowed or even inconvenienced by a guardhouse. The same is true of the tax roll, the plat book, the recorded declaration and every lien, mortgage, release and judgment that touches the parcel. Where a gate is often described as making a person hard to find, the honest description is that it makes them hard to approach. Those are different problems with different owners, and conflating them is why so much of the published advice slides straight into telling readers how to sneak past a guard.

One caveat worth carrying, since it is the first thing a records search will hit. Access to online county portals varies enormously – some counties publish a full grantor-grantee index back decades and let you download images free, others put the index online and charge for the document, and a few still require a visit or a written request. That is a county-level difference, not a gated-community difference, and it applies just as much to the farmhouse two miles away. Where the parcel or the county turns out to be awkward, the work of pulling and reconciling those documents is what our skip tracing and public-records research is for.

The Association Is a Corporation, and Corporations File

The body that controls the gate is usually the most findable entity in the entire equation.

Here is the part that surprises people who assume a gated community is opaque by design. The homeowners or property owners association is, in the ordinary case, an incorporated non-profit. It has articles of incorporation, a corporate name, a board of directors, an annual filing obligation and – the item that matters most here – a registered agent, whose name and address are on file with the state precisely so that the world has somewhere lawful to send legal papers. A registered agent exists to be found. That is its entire function.

Two states are enough to show how this is exposed. The Arizona Corporation Commission’s Corporations Division states that it maintains its filings and business information “in a database that is accessible to the public,” and it runs a business search that anybody can use; see the Corporations Division’s own description of its records. Washington goes a step further and treats registration as the trigger for being an association at all: the state’s Office of Regulatory Innovation and Assistance explains that an HOA must register with the state if it collects dues, enforces CC&Rs, maintains shared areas, approves improvements or acts as the official voice for the community, that registration is incorporation through the Secretary of State’s Corporations and Charities Division, and that an annual report is due every year thereafter. An organization filing an annual report every year is not an organization that has vanished.

This is the practical difference between a gated subdivision and, say, a person living out of a vehicle. There is an institution attached to the address. It has a name, a mailing address, officers, a lawyer more often than not, and frequently a professional management company under contract whose own corporate filing is equally public. If the reason you are looking is a delinquent assessment, a dispute over a boundary, an unpaid invoice for work done on a lot, or a legal notice that has to be delivered to somebody, then the association or its agent is a lawful correspondent you can approach openly, on the record, in your own name.

Now the honest limits, because two of them get glossed over constantly. First: a lawful point of contact is not a lookup service. The association is not obliged to tell a stranger who lives at lot 47, and in many places it should not. Florida requires an association to keep, among its official records, a current roster of all members with their designated mailing addresses and parcel identifications – but that is an official record subject to member inspection rights, not a public directory, and the statute separately shields personal identifiers within it. Approaching the association is how you deliver something or open a conversation. It is not how you extract a resident’s details.

Second, and this is the cleanest illustration on the whole page: the gate’s own records are more closed than the deed behind it. Florida’s community association statute lists categories that are not accessible even to members and parcel owners, and one of them is “information an association obtains in a gated community in connection with guests’ visits to parcel owners or community residents” – Fla. Stat. s. 720.303(5). Read that against the recorded deed and the contrast is complete. The conveyance of the house is public to the whole world. The log of who drove up to it on Tuesday is withheld from the dues-paying neighbor across the street. Anyone who offers you a gate log, a guard’s confirmation or a visitor history is describing something they either do not have or should not be handing over.

Associations also generate a paper trail that runs outward into court, and that trail is public. Assessment liens are recorded. Foreclosure actions on those liens are filed and docketed. Suits between an association and an owner name both parties. Where an owner has been in a long-running dispute with a board, the record of it is frequently the most detailed source available about who that owner is and where they receive notices – which is the same machinery that sits behind our work on a neighbor or association dispute.

Owner, Occupant, and the Gap Between Them

The deed tells you who holds title. On a lot behind a gate it is unusually likely to be somebody else entirely.

This is where searches genuinely fail, and it has nothing to do with security. The recorded owner and the resident are two facts, and the county only certifies one of them. A deed names a grantee. It does not certify that the grantee sleeps there, and nothing in the recording system ever will.

Gated communities skew the odds on that gap in ways worth naming. They contain a high proportion of second homes, seasonal residences and rental stock, so the owner of record may live in another state entirely and the house may be occupied by a tenant who never appears in the deed index. Title is frequently held by a revocable trust for estate planning, in which case the grantee on the deed is a trustee and the name you actually want may not be printed anywhere on the instrument. Title is also frequently held by a limited liability company, sometimes formed for exactly this purpose – and an LLC has its own filing, its own agent and its own members, which is a research path rather than a dead end. Untangling that is the subject of our guide to property held by an LLC or a trust. Where the owner turns out to be a landlord renting the house out, reaching them is the ordinary problem covered in finding a property owner’s contact information.

So be blunt about what a commercial “hit” on one of these addresses usually is. When a people-search product returns a name attached to a house inside a gate, the name is disproportionately likely to be the owner of record rather than the occupant, and the address attached to it is disproportionately likely to be the tax-bill mailing address rather than the house. Sometimes what comes back is a management company, because the management company is the entity that appears in the correspondence trail. None of those results is wrong, exactly. They are just answers to a question nobody asked.

Closing that gap is a verification job, and it is deliberately short here because the honest answer is short. Occupancy is corroborated by sources that record a person at a place rather than a person owning a place: utility connections and change-of-service records where a permissible purpose applies, voter registration where a state publishes it, vehicle registration and driver records where the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act supplies a permissible use – service of process and litigation being one of the enumerated ones – and, in litigation, the tenancy documents themselves. We are not going to inflate that into a section pretending it is unique to gated communities, because it is not. It is the same occupancy question we work everywhere, set out properly in confirming who actually lives at an address. What is particular to a gated community is that the association layer sometimes resolves it faster than any of them: an association that bills assessments, approves architectural changes, issues gate credentials and keeps a member roster knows perfectly well whether lot 47 is owner-occupied or let – and it will not tell you, which is the correct outcome and the reason the question routes through counsel rather than through a phone call.

One more distinction that gets missed. A community with a guardhouse, an amenity roster and a private street network is often also governed by a management company under contract, and that company is not the association. It is a vendor. It has its own registered agent, its own filings, and frequently a portfolio of dozens of communities. When correspondence to an association bounces or goes unanswered, the management company is often the entity that is actually reading the mail – a distinction that decides where a letter should have gone in the first place.

What the Gate Actually Closes, and What It Leaves Wide Open

Set the record layers beside the access layers and the whole topic sorts itself out.

What you might wantWhere it livesDoes the gate change anything?
Owner of record for the lotCounty recorder’s grantor-grantee index; the recorded deedOpenNo. Indexed exactly as any other parcel in the county
Parcel number, legal description, tax mailing addressCounty assessor or appraisal district rollNo. Somebody has to be billed, and the bill has to be posted somewhere
Lot layout, private streets, easementsThe recorded subdivision platNo. The plat was recorded before the wall existed
CC&Rs, declaration, amendmentsRecorded against the land in the county recordsNo. They must be recorded to bind later purchasers
The association’s officers and registered agentSecretary of State or equivalent corporate registryNo. Public corporate filings, searchable by name
Liens, association foreclosures, owner litigationRecorder’s office and the court docketNo. Both are public records in the ordinary way
The member roster with mailing addressesAn association official recordPartly. Member inspection rights in some states; not a public directory
Guest and visitor gate recordsHeld by the association or its guard contractorYes – and closed. In Florida, withheld even from members
Standing at the front doorPhysical access across private propertyYes. This is the only thing the gate genuinely obstructs
The point of the tableEight of the nine rows are unaffected by the gate. The one that is affected is a lawyer’s question, a sheriff’s question or a licensed process server’s question – not a research question, and never a question answered by talking your way past a guard.

The row that decides most inquiries is the last one, so treat it as the fork in the road. If what you need is a name, a parcel, an owner, a mailing address or a corporate contact, everything above the line is available and we can assemble it. If what you need is a human being physically at a door with papers in hand, you are looking for a process server or a sheriff’s civil division in that state, and our part is limited to supplying the verified address they will work from – the same supporting role described on finding someone in order to serve papers.

Service at a Gate Is a Question of State Law

Several states have legislated on it specifically. None of them legislated a workaround for the general public.

Because the gate obstructs approach rather than discovery, the law that governs it is procedural law about service, and it is written state by state. We are naming three provisions here so you can see that the question has real answers, and then we are handing it over. What follows is general legal information about statutes that exist. It is not a procedure, it is not advice, and it is not something to attempt on the strength of a web page.

California addresses it directly. Under Code of Civil Procedure section 415.21, “any person shall be granted access to a gated community or a covered multifamily dwelling for a reasonable period of time for the sole purpose of performing lawful service of process or service of a subpoena” on displaying current identification together with either confirmation of acting for a sheriff, marshal or specified public office, or evidence of current registration as a process server or licensure as a private investigator. Note the limit that most summaries drop: subdivision (b) confines the section to a community or dwelling that is staffed by a guard or other security personnel at the time service is attempted. An unstaffed keypad gate is outside it.

Florida is broader on its face. Section 48.031(7) of the Florida Statutes provides that “a gated residential community, including a condominium association or a cooperative, shall grant unannounced entry into the community, including its common areas and common elements, to a person who is attempting to serve process on a defendant or witness who resides within or is known to be within the community.” There is no guard-staffing qualifier in that sentence and the duty runs to the community itself.

Nevada took a third approach and legislated for the residence rather than the server. Nevada Revised Statutes section 14.090, titled “Service of process at residence accessible only through gate,” sets out what happens in each of the two situations – a posted guard who denies access, and a gate with no guard where entry is not reasonably available – and supplies a mechanism for each, while stating that the manner of service it authorizes is supplemental to and does not affect the validity of any other manner of service authorized by law. We are describing the shape of that statute rather than reproducing its operation, deliberately. Nevada’s legislative site is not on our external allowlist, so we name the citation and leave you to read it at the source.

Three states, three different designs, and forty-seven other jurisdictions we have not researched for you. That is the real lesson rather than any of the individual rules: whether a particular gate can lawfully be passed, whether a guard may be served in a resident’s place, and what an affidavit of service must recite are questions for a lawyer in that state and for the sheriff or licensed server who will actually go. We supply the verified address and the association’s public contact points. We do not opine on service, we do not attempt it, and where a page in this niche walks a member of the public through “getting in,” it is skipping the part where a licensed professional carries the risk.

Six Ways a Gated Address Goes Sideways

Each one is a records problem in disguise, and none of them is solved at the gate.

The deed names a trust

The grantee reads as a trustee holding under a declaration of trust, and the person you want is a beneficiary who is named nowhere on the instrument. That is an estate-planning arrangement, not concealment, and it changes the research path rather than ending it.

The tax bill goes out of state

The parcel sits in Florida and the assessor posts the bill to Ohio. That mismatch is a finding, not a failure – it usually means a second home, a seasonal owner or a rental, and it tells you which of the two addresses is the one that gets read.

The resident is a tenant

Nothing in the deed index will ever name them, because they hold under a lease rather than a conveyance. The owner knows, the association usually knows, and neither is obliged to say. Occupancy has to be corroborated from sources that record people rather than title.

The street is not on the map

Interior roads in a private subdivision are sometimes missing or misnamed in commercial mapping and occasionally in postal data, which makes an address look invented when it is merely private. The recorded plat settles it, because the plat is where those street names were created.

The unit number is a guess

Villa and townhome sections inside a larger community renumber in ways that map tiles do not follow, so the parcel and the postal address disagree. The legal description on the deed governs, and reconciling it to a mailable address is ordinary work rather than an obstacle.

Somebody offers you the gate log

Treat that as a warning about the source rather than a lead. Visitor information collected at a gate is not a public record anywhere we have looked, and in Florida it is expressly withheld even from the community’s own members.

How We Work an Address Behind a Gate

Four steps, none of which involve the entrance.

1

Fix the parcel, not the ZIP code

We start from the legal description and the parcel number rather than the street address, because on a private street those two can disagree. Plat, assessor roll and deed get reconciled to one identified lot before anything is said about who is on it.

2

Read title through to a human

The chain of conveyances, and where title rests in an entity, its corporate filing, its agent and its officers. A trust or an LLC on the deed is a step in the path. We say which layer a name came from, so you know whether you are holding an owner or an intermediary.

3

Identify the association and its agent

The association’s corporate registration, its officers, its registered agent and any management company under contract – all from public filings. That gives you a lawful correspondent for anything that has to be delivered rather than discovered.

4

Test occupancy, then hand it over

Owner and occupant get separated before delivery, with the sources shown for each. Where the county publishes its index online a first pass usually reaches you within 24 hours, and where it does not we say so before you commit. If the next step is service, you take the file to a lawyer, a sheriff’s civil division or a licensed process server in that state. We do not go to the gate.

The Gate Invites a Lie. We Do Not Tell It

Written out in full, because on this particular topic the published advice openly recommends the thing we refuse.

Start with the refusal, since it is the reason this section is longer than usual. When we researched what currently ranks for this question, the collective advice included following a resident’s car through the gate and asking somebody inside to walk you in. That is social engineering with the serial numbers filed off, and the closely related versions are worse: presenting yourself as a delivery driver, a contractor, a landscaper, a utility worker, an invited guest of a resident, or a prospective buyer viewing a property, in order to get a barrier lifted or to get a guard or a management office to confirm that a particular person lives there.

We do not do any of it, and we will not coach you through it. Nobody here telephones a guardhouse pretending to be somebody else. Nobody here tells a management company they are a courier with a parcel. Nobody here poses as a buyer to get an agent to open a door, and nobody here follows a resident’s bumper through a closing gate. Pretext of that kind is dishonest at the outset; depending on where it happens and what it produces it can also amount to trespass on private property, or worse. It is also unnecessary, which is the part that ought to settle it. Everything above this section came out of a courthouse, an assessor’s roll and a corporate registry, in our own name, with a source we can show you.

What we do instead: we work recorded instruments and public filings; we write to an association or a registered agent openly, identifying who we are and what we want; and where the objective is physical delivery of legal papers we route it to counsel and to a sheriff or licensed process server, who have lawful standing that a research firm does not. If that produces a slower answer than a stranger with a clipboard and a story, we would rather be slow.

The rest of the boundaries follow from what we are. We are a public-records and skip-tracing research firm, and we are not licensed private investigators – we do not hold ourselves out as any. We run no surveillance, we sit outside no entrance, we photograph no vehicle and we do not attend an address on your behalf. Neither do we reach anything not lawfully available to us: no live handset location, no cell-site data, no message contents, no account access, and nothing inside a private financial account – no balances, no statements, no transaction histories. A firm advertising any of that on a page about gated communities is telling you about a crime, not a capability.

Every search runs on a stated, lawful purpose, and we ask what yours is before the work begins rather than after you have paid. Where a source is regulated we use it only where a permissible use genuinely applies and we record which one: driver and vehicle records under the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act, whose enumerated uses include a civil, criminal, administrative or arbitral proceeding “including the service of process, investigation in anticipation of litigation, and the execution or enforcement of judgments and orders”; financial identifiers under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Neither statute contains an exception for curiosity, and a gated community is precisely the sort of address that attracts curiosity.

We are not a consumer reporting agency and nothing we deliver is a consumer report. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act a consumer report is a communication by a consumer reporting agency bearing on a person’s credit worthiness, character, general reputation, personal characteristics or mode of living that is used or expected to be used as a factor in establishing eligibility for credit or insurance, for employment purposes, or for another purpose authorized by the statute’s definitions. Our work may not be used for any of that. This matters more here than on most pages, because gated communities are full of landlords and rental units, and “find out who is living in my rental” slides very easily into a tenancy decision. Tenant screening, deciding whether to rent to somebody, deciding whether to renew, employment decisions, insurance underwriting, credit and licensing all require a consumer reporting agency with the disclosure, written authorization and adverse-action machinery the Act builds around them. Where that is what you need, we will say so and decline rather than sell you something that cannot lawfully do the job.

Then the decline we apply hardest, and the reason it belongs on this page in particular. A gated community is a place a great many people deliberately move to – after a protective order, after leaving a violent household, after a stalking case, after a public dispute, after being found once already. The wall is frequently the point. So we will not accept work where the objective is to locate somebody who moved in order not to be reachable by the person asking: an ex-partner, a former spouse, somebody who obtained an order, somebody who left a refuge, somebody whose new address was deliberately withheld. We ask about this at intake, we ask again if an answer moves, and where we cannot tell a legitimate purpose from a dangerous one we stop and refuse the work – accepting that this will occasionally turn away someone with a perfectly good reason. Handing a controlled address to the one person it endangers is not a mistake that can be corrected afterwards. If you are the person behind the gate and you believe you are being traced, speak to a victim-services advocate or to the court that issued your order about address-confidentiality programs, and take it as settled that no legitimate research firm should be helping anybody route around one.

Everything on this page is general information rather than legal advice. Recording practice, association statutes, roster and records-inspection rights, and the law of service at a private entrance are all state and county matters, and they differ enough that a national answer would mislead you. Where you need an order rather than a record – permission to serve by another method, a subpoena to an association, access to a private road – that is a lawyer’s work in the relevant state, and it is usually cheaper to ask early than late.

Who Brings Us an Address Behind a Gate

Six recurring reasons, and not one of them is answered at the entrance.

Association boards

An absentee owner of a delinquent parcel who stopped answering the assessment notices.

Lien claimants

A contractor owed money for work on a lot who needs the owner of record to perfect a claim.

Title and escrow desks

A closing held up because the seller of record is a dissolved entity or a deceased trustee.

Civil litigators

A verified address and a lawful contact point to hand to the server who will actually go.

Relatives who lost touch

A family member who moved into a community years ago and whose post now bounces.

Insurance subrogation

A loss traced to a parcel inside the community where the responsible owner has to be identified.

What connects them is that every one arrives believing the wall is the obstacle, and in every one the obstacle turns out to be a title layer, an entity, or the distance between the person who owns the house and the person sleeping in it.

What You Get, and What We Will Not Sell You

You get documents and the citations to them: the recorded instrument, the parcel, the corporate filing, the office each came from. Every name arrives labeled with which layer produced it, so an owner is never quietly presented to you as a resident. We will not sell you a gate log, a guard’s confirmation or a visitor history, because no lawful version of those exists to be sold. Where the records cannot carry a confident answer on occupancy, we report that rather than round it up, and where the real next step is a process server or a lawyer we say so before taking the work rather than afterwards.

People Locator Skip Tracing Investigation Team – public-records research and skip tracing since 2004. Statutes cited here were read at the issuing state’s own site in 2026; recording practice and association law change, so confirm anything you intend to rely on with counsel in that state.

Questions About Gates, Deeds and Guards

Can you find out who owns a house in a gated community?

Yes, and it is one of the more routine things we do. The subdivision was platted and recorded, every conveyance since was recorded, and the assessor carries the parcel with an owner name and a tax mailing address. None of that is sealed and the gate has no effect on any of it. The genuine difficulty is not access to the record but what the record contains – the owner may be a trust, an LLC or a landlord rather than the person you are picturing.

Are gated community records private because the streets are private?

No. Private ownership of the internal roads is itself established by a recorded plat and a recorded declaration, so the very fact that makes the streets private is a public document. Ownership of the land, the covenants encumbering it, the liens against it and the association’s corporate filings are all public in the ordinary way. What private street ownership actually affects is who may lawfully drive on the road, which is a physical-access question rather than a records question.

Can I get the visitor log or gate records to prove somebody lives there?

Not from us, and in Florida not even if you are a member of the association. Florida’s community association statute lists records that are not accessible to members or parcel owners, and it expressly includes information an association obtains in a gated community in connection with guests’ visits to owners or residents. Other states treat it as an internal record of a private corporation. Where such material is genuinely needed in litigation, that is a subpoena question for a lawyer, not something a research firm can produce.

Will you call the guardhouse or the management office to confirm somebody lives there?

No. We do not make pretext calls, and we would not make a truthful one for this purpose either, because asking a guard to confirm a resident is asking them to disclose something they should not. Occupancy gets corroborated from records that document a person at a place, or it gets reported to you as unconfirmed. If the published advice you have read suggests posing as a delivery driver or a prospective buyer, that is the practice this page exists to contradict.

How is the homeowners association itself findable?

In the usual case it is an incorporated non-profit, which means articles of incorporation, officers, an annual filing and a registered agent on record with a state corporate registry. Arizona’s Corporation Commission describes its filings database as accessible to the public; Washington treats registration with the Secretary of State as what makes an HOA a legal entity at all. That gives you an open, lawful correspondent – though the association is not a directory and is not obliged to identify residents to strangers.

Does a process server have a right to get through the gate?

It depends entirely on the state, and it is a question for counsel and for the server rather than for you. California grants access for lawful service on identification, but only where the community is staffed by a guard at the time. Florida requires a gated residential community to grant unannounced entry to a person attempting to serve process. Nevada has a dedicated statute for residences reachable only through a gate. Most states have legislated none of this, so the answer where you are may be entirely different.

The address search returned a name, but the neighbors say somebody else lives there. Why?

Because you were almost certainly handed the owner of record rather than the occupant, and commercial data reflects title and mail far better than it reflects who sleeps in a house. Gated communities are heavy with second homes, seasonal residents and rentals, so the gap is wider here than on an average street. The fix is to treat the owner as one fact and occupancy as a separate one requiring its own corroboration, which is exactly how we deliver it.

Can I use this to check out a tenant or an applicant?

No. We are not a consumer reporting agency and our work is not a consumer report, so it may not be used to decide a tenancy, a renewal, employment, credit, insurance or a license. That boundary bites often on this topic because so many homes behind gates are rented out. Screening decisions require a consumer reporting agency with the disclosure, authorization and adverse-action steps the Fair Credit Reporting Act builds around them, and we will decline rather than supply a substitute.

Send Us the Lot, Not the Gate Code

A name, a community, a street address, a parcel number – any one of them is enough to start reconciling the plat, the deed and the roll. You get the documents and the office each came from, with owner and occupant kept apart. If what you actually need is a process server or a lawyer, tell our team what you are trying to achieve and we will say so before you spend anything.

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