Fresno & Central Valley Skip Tracing
Half the addresses in a Valley file were never residences. They were the place the mail went – a labor contractor’s yard, a relative’s house in Selma, a post office box in Kerman rented for a season and kept for a decade. The paperwork treats that string as where a person lives, and it holds until the day somebody has to knock on the door. Our job on a Fresno or Central Valley matter is to work out which of the addresses attached to a name is a residence, which is a mail drop, and which is neither any more – and to do it across a region where the very next county files the same document under a different office with a different name. This page names those offices, says whose definition of “the Central Valley” it is using, and is specific about what the public record here will and will not tell you.
The Short Version
Most Central Valley addresses fail for the same reason: they were never residences to begin with. Fresno anchors a region where the addresses of record decay faster than the files that carry them, because so many of them were mailing addresses to begin with. Working one properly means knowing three things most people never look up. First, whose Central Valley you mean – the Census puts only Fresno and Madera counties in the Fresno metropolitan area, while California’s own Health and Safety Code section 40600 names eight counties for the San Joaquin Valley and takes only part of one of them. Second, which office holds the record – Fresno keeps its Recorder and its County Clerk as two separate departments at two separate counters, and its neighbours mostly do not. Third, what the court’s public portal deliberately withholds, including a sixty-day door on eviction files that you cannot open without already knowing the address. We work under a permissible purpose, through recorded documents, court files and lawfully licensed data, and we are a public-records research firm rather than licensed private investigators. This page is general information about records, not legal advice.
Watch: Central Valley Locates
Finding people across the valley.
Watch Overview
Why a Valley Address Goes Stale Before Your File Does
What the string in your file is actually a record of.
Start with the thing everyone skips. An address in a file is not a statement about where somebody sleeps. It is a statement about where a particular organisation was willing to send something on a particular day, and the two come apart faster in the San Joaquin Valley than almost anywhere else in California – not because people here are evasive, but because the ordinary way of living and working here produces addresses that were never residential in the first place.
Three things drive it. The work is seasonal and the employer of record is often not the grower. California licenses farm labor contractors as a distinct class of employer: Labor Code section 1682(b) defines a farm labor contractor as a person who, for a fee, employs workers for farm production on behalf of a third party or who recruits, supplies or hires on an employer’s behalf, and section 1683(a) states flatly that “a person shall not act as a farm labor contractor until a license to do so has been issued to the person by the Labor Commissioner and the license is in full force and effect and in the person’s possession.” That licensing scheme is why a Valley employment trail so often leads to a contractor’s business address rather than to a worksite or a home, and why a crew that moved from stone fruit outside Reedley to table grapes outside Delano can change everything about where they live while changing nothing about the address a payroll record shows.
The housing follows the calendar. A tenancy that begins with a crop and ends with it leaves a short, thin paper trail: no long utility history, no multi-year lease renewal, sometimes no filing anywhere at all. Records research is very good at finding people who sign things. It is slower with people whose last twelve months produced nothing to sign.
And the mail address outlives the residence. A post office box in a small Valley town, or a permanent family address in a place like Sanger or Dinuba that a whole extended family uses for anything official, will keep receiving correspondence for years after the person stopped living within fifty miles of it. That address is not wrong. It is simply answering a different question than the one you asked, which is why an unverified hit on it fails at the door.
What this means for the way a Valley locate is built
The practical consequence is that we treat every address in a Valley file as a claim to be classified rather than a destination to be confirmed. Is this a recorded property interest, in which case somebody signed a document in front of a notary and there is an instrument number behind it? Is it an address given to a court in a filing, in which case it was current on the day of filing and carries a date? Is it a mailing address on a business registration, which tells you where an owner wanted post to go and nothing else? Or is it a licensed-data record with a first-seen and last-seen date, in which case the dates matter more than the string does?
Those are different classes of evidence with different failure modes, and running them together is how a locate produces an address that looks well-supported and is six years out of date. The general method behind this – build from what you have, corroborate, then date the result – is set out in our explainer on how a records-based locate is actually assembled; what follows here is the Valley-specific version, office by office.
Whose Central Valley? The Legislature Named Eight Counties
A phrase the competing pages use and none of them defines.
“The Central Valley” is not a jurisdiction, and a page that uses the phrase without saying which definition it means is quietly promising coverage it has not thought about. There are at least two defensible answers and they are very far apart, so here is the one this page uses and the one it does not.
The narrow answer: the Census metropolitan area is two counties
Under the federal delineations, the Fresno metropolitan statistical area – CBSA 23420 – contains Fresno County and Madera County, and nothing else. Kings, Tulare, Merced, Kern, Stanislaus and San Joaquin are each the core of their own separate metropolitan area. So if someone tells you a Fresno-metro search covers the Valley, that is not what the Census means by Fresno metro. Anyone quoting a “Fresno area” population, employment or housing figure is almost certainly quoting a two-county number.
The answer this page uses: the eight counties named in statute
California’s own Legislature has enumerated the San Joaquin Valley, by county, in an enacted statute. Health and Safety Code section 40600(a) describes an air district “formed by the Counties of Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Tulare” – and then, in the same sentence, defines the district as “consisting of the Counties of Fresno, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Tulare, and that portion of the County of Kern that is within the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin.”
Read that twice, because the second clause is not the same as the first. Eight counties formed it; seven of them joined whole, and Kern joined only in part. Kern is large enough that a meaningful piece of it – the desert side, out past the Tehachapis – sits outside the Valley’s air basin altogether, so the statute takes the Valley portion and leaves the rest. The same statute divides the district’s hearing boards into a northern, a central and a southern region, which is a fair description of how a Valley matter actually behaves: Stockton is not Bakersfield, and a file that starts in Fresno is equally likely to run either way.
You can read section 40600 for yourself on the Legislature’s own site, at California Health and Safety Code section 40600. We use the eight-county list because it is the one a Valley resident, a Valley grower and a Valley court would all recognise, and because it is checkable – which a marketing map is not. When a locate leaves those eight counties we say so plainly rather than stretching the label, and the statewide picture is covered separately in our guide to locating people across California.
Where the trail leaves California entirely
One consequence of the seasonal-work pattern is worth stating openly, because it changes what a Valley locate should cost you in time. Agricultural work in the San Joaquin Valley is not a closed system, and a trail that goes cold here in November has a habit of reappearing in the winter-vegetable and construction economies of the desert Southwest. When a Fresno file resolves to an Arizona address, the records change underneath you – different recorders, a different court structure, a different set of licence registries – and it stops being a California matter. That is a different research problem with its own map, which is why we keep a separate treatment of locating people across the Phoenix metro and Maricopa County rather than pretending one page covers both.
Eight Counties, Eight Different Names for the Records Office
The same document, filed with an office called something else next door.
Here is the thing that makes a Valley locate different from a big-city one, and it has nothing to do with distance. A deed, a deed of trust, a mechanic’s lien and an abstract of judgment are recorded in the county where the land sits. In a single-county metro that is one office and one index. Across the eight Valley counties it is eight offices, organised eight different ways, and the office is not called the same thing twice.
Checked on each county’s own published directory: Madera runs a combined County Clerk-Recorder-Elections. Merced has a Clerk-Recorder. Kings puts an Assessor/Clerk/Recorder inside its General Services Agency. Tulare has an Assessor/Clerk-Recorder. Stanislaus has a Clerk Recorder. San Joaquin folds three jobs into an Assessor / Recorder / County Clerk. Kern splits it the other way, listing an Assessor-Recorder alongside a separately-listed County Clerk.
Fresno is the odd one out, and it matters more than it sounds
Fresno County is the only one of those eight where “Recorder” is a department by itself – not attached to the Assessor, not attached to the Clerk, not attached to Elections. Its counterpart, the County Clerk / Registrar of Voters, is a wholly separate department under a separate elected officer, currently James A. Kus.
The split is not cosmetic, because the two offices hold completely different things and people routinely go to the wrong one. The Fresno County Recorder describes its own duty as providing “public notice by accepting and recording legal documents required by law” and maintaining birth, marriage and death records and indices for the county. That is the property side and the vital-records side: instruments, liens, transfers, and certified copies of certificates. It handles, by its own count, more than two hundred distinct document types, and it says in terms that “recorded documents are public records” that “can be researched and viewed in our office at no charge.”
The County Clerk holds an entirely different set: marriage licences as opposed to marriage certificates, passports, notary registration, professional registrations, and – the one that matters most for a Valley locate – fictitious business name filings, with a public FBN lookup. Clerk services in Fresno County are appointment-only and appointments are scheduled online. There is also a third body confusingly close in name, the Clerk of the Board of Supervisors, which handles assessment appeals, claims for damages and parcel and tract maps for recordation, and which is not where you go for anything about a person.
Why the FBN index is underrated here
Fictitious business name filings are, in an agricultural economy, one of the better identity anchors available. A packing shed, a hauling outfit, a custom-harvest operation, a roadside stand, a small labor-supply business – each of them files, and each filing carries a registrant’s name and an address on the day it was signed. It is a dated, sworn, county-level record that ties a human being to a business address, and it survives a residential move because it is indexed to the business rather than the home. It will not tell you where somebody sleeps. It will very often tell you which county they were operating out of in a given year, which is where you start looking.
A practical note that costs people a wasted trip
The Fresno County Recorder has moved. Its own page carries the notice in as many words: “We’ve moved to a new location. We’re no longer in the Hall of Records.” The office is now at 1250 Van Ness Avenue in downtown Fresno, with free customer parking, and the in-person route to the official records index is a kiosk on the second floor. Copies can also be ordered online through the county’s hosted records portal. Any guide that still sends you to the Hall of Records for a Fresno instrument is out of date, and a surprising number of them do.
What Sits in Each Office, and What Does Not
Fresno County, by counter rather than by category.
| Office | Holds | What it will not give you |
|---|---|---|
| Fresno County Recorder | Recorded instruments, liens, transfers; birth, death and marriage certificates. 200+ types | Any statement that the person still lives at the address on the instrument. |
| Fresno County Clerk | Marriage licences, notary and professional registration, fictitious business names and the FBN lookup. | Recorded property documents – those are the Recorder’s, at a different counter. |
| Clerk of the Board of Supervisors | Assessment appeals, claims for damages, parcel and tract maps for recordation. | Anything person-level; it is a board office, not a records office. |
| Superior Court, B. F. Sisk | Civil limited and unlimited, small claims, unlawful detainer, probate, family law, restraining orders. | Eviction files inside the sixty-day window, and any identity field in the case index. |
| Court Archives, “E” Street | Over a million case files, some as early as 1860; judgments microfilmed before destruction. | Remote access – a picture ID and an in-person visit are required to pull a folder. |
| Neighbouring county recorders | The same instrument classes, under seven other office names across the eight-county Valley. | A shared index. Each county is searched separately, on its own system. |
Reading that table sideways is the actual skill. A Fresno abstract of judgment tells you a creditor believed something on a date; a Madera deed tells you a person signed in front of a notary; a Tulare fictitious business name tells you somebody claimed a business address. None of them alone is a residence. Two or three of them agreeing, with dates that move in the right direction, usually is – and where they disagree, the disagreement is itself the finding and we report it as one.
The Court: One County, Several Buildings, and a Sixty-Day Door
Fresno Superior Court’s own directory, and what its portal withholds.
California has no single statewide trial-court records system. Each of the fifty-eight superior courts runs its own portal on its own terms, which is why an eight-county Valley search is eight separate court searches and not one query. Fresno’s is worth understanding in detail, because the court publishes its own limits and almost nobody reads them.
Which building holds what
The court’s published locations directory lists seven facilities, and they are not interchangeable. The B. F. Sisk Courthouse at 1130 O Street is the civil building: by the court’s own listing it takes civil limited and unlimited, small claims, unlawful detainer, probate and conservatorship, family law, restraining orders, alternative dispute resolution and the self-help centre (Centro De Recursos Legales). The Fresno Superior Courthouse at 1100 Van Ness Avenue is the criminal and juvenile-dependency building, and also houses the ACTION Center on its first floor. The “M” Street Courthouse at 2317 Tuolumne Street takes criminal and traffic infractions. Criminal Departments 95 and 96 sit at the Jail Annex, 1265 M Street. Juvenile Justice Court is out at 3333 East American Avenue. And the Archives Facility at 1963 “E” Street is where closed files go.
For almost everything a creditor, a landlord’s counsel or a server cares about, the answer is B. F. Sisk. That is a small fact with a large effect on turnaround: if you have been told a Fresno civil file is “at the courthouse”, there are three downtown buildings that answer to that description and only one of them has your file.
The sixty-day door on eviction files, and the circularity inside it
Fresno’s public case portal states its own most important restriction plainly: “Unlawful Detainer cases are not available for sixty days after the complaint is filed with the court.” That is not a local policy choice. It is Code of Civil Procedure section 1161.2, whose opening subdivision restricts the clerk to allowing access to these limited civil case records – file, index and register of actions alike – only in the circumstances the section then enumerates, and that enumeration is short.
The list is worth reading closely, because subparagraph (B) contains a genuine trap for anyone doing a locate. Early access is allowed “to a person who provides the clerk with the names of at least one plaintiff and one defendant and the address of the premises, including the apartment or unit number, if any.” In other words: inside the sixty days, the clerk will show you the eviction file only if you can already state the address – down to the unit – which is very often the exact thing the locate was commissioned to establish. The door opens for a party or their attorney, for a resident who can prove residency, on a court order for good cause, and otherwise at sixty days where judgment went to the plaintiff. The section was last amended by AB 2304 in 2024, effective 1 January 2025, and you can read the operative text at Code of Civil Procedure section 1161.2.
The honest professional answer to that constraint is not a workaround. It is to build the address from the recorder, the business filings and licensed data, and to treat the eviction file as confirmation once it opens rather than as the starting point. Anyone who offers to get you inside the window without meeting the statute’s conditions is telling you something about how they work.
The case index cannot confirm identity, by design
Fresno Superior Court will sell you a bulk case index – a Criminal and Traffic report and a Civil and Small Claims report, under the California Rules of Court that govern bulk distribution. It is genuinely useful, and it has a limitation that decides how it can be used. The court’s own page lists the fields that are stripped: “social security number, financial, warrant, victim, and witness information, ethnicity, age, gender, government identification number, driver’s license number, and date of birth must be excluded from indexes.”
Date of birth is the single most useful identity discriminator in a region with large extended families and heavily shared surnames, and it is not in the index. Neither is age, nor any government identifier. So a Fresno case index will tell you that a person with a given name was a party to a matter of a given type on a given date – and it will not, on its own, tell you it was your person. That is why identity confirmation on a Valley file has to come from somewhere the index does not reach, and why a name match out of a court index is a lead rather than a finding. The reports are priced per report, capped at one month of data each, and ordered by post with a cheque to the court’s accounting department.
What the portal is, and is not
Two more disclosures from the same page deserve attention. The system “only shows information that can be viewed by the public” – so an absence in the portal is not evidence of an absence in the court. And in capitals: the information obtained from the site “does not constitute the official record of the court.” A certified copy requires a visit or a written request. We treat portal output as a pointer to a file, never as the file.
There is even a quirk in how you have to type a query, which the court documents: for civil cases you must remove the final three letters from the case number printed on the documents before searching – for a number like 03CECG00001 SJK, you enter 03CECG00001. It is trivial and it is also the reason a lot of people conclude a Fresno case “isn’t in the system” when it is.
Where the old files went
Closed matters end up at the Archives on “E” Street, which by the court’s own account “houses over 1 million cases with some recorded as early as 1860,” treats anything before 1911 as historical, and is responsible for “record destruction/management, and microfilming of judgments and records prior to destruction.” That last clause is the one to notice on an old judgment: the paper may be gone and the microfilm may be what survives. Pulling a folder requires a visit and photo identification. It is not a remote resource, and any plan that depends on an eighteen-nineties Fresno filing needs to budget for somebody physically standing at 1963 “E” Street.
Where a Central Valley Locate Actually Breaks
Six failure modes we see on Fresno-area files specifically.
The mail drop that reads as a home
A box in a small Valley town keeps receiving post for years. Service attempted there comes back non-est and the file loses a month.
The wrong county’s recorder
The subject moved twelve miles and the instrument is now in Madera or Kings. One county searched, three not, and the index looks empty.
The eviction file that is still shut
Filed forty days ago, so the clerk cannot show it unless you can already state the unit number. The record exists and is out of reach.
The shared surname
Three plausible matches in one ZIP code, and the court index has no date of birth to separate them. Identity has to be built elsewhere.
The employer that is a contractor
The payroll address belongs to a licensed labor contractor’s office, not to a worksite and not to a residence. It dates the person, not the place.
The judgment older than the file
The abstract is decades old, the paper has been microfilmed and destroyed, and confirming it means somebody standing in the Archives on “E” Street.
How We Work a File That Crosses County Lines
Four passes, in this order, for a reason.
Classify every address you already have
Residence, mail drop, business address or dead string – sorted before anything new is developed.
Anchor identity away from the court index
Because the index strips date of birth, the person is fixed first through recorded instruments and licensed data.
Run the counties the trail actually touches
Fresno first, then whichever of the other seven the evidence points at – each on its own recorder and its own court.
Date the result and name its source
Every address returned with the office or dataset behind it and the day it was current.
The ordering is deliberate. Anchoring identity before geography is what stops a Valley file resolving to a cousin, and dating the result is what stops a correct 2019 address being presented as a current one. Where a matter needs the same discipline further north, the capital-region equivalent is covered in our page on locating people in Sacramento and the northern valley, and the full range of what we take on sits under our skip tracing services.
We also work as the records layer behind other professionals rather than in competition with them. A California-licensed investigator running a Valley case, or a firm that needs the recorder and court work done properly while it handles the fieldwork it is licensed for, is a normal engagement for us; how that division of labour works in practice is set out on our page for licensed investigators who outsource records research.
Six Reasons a Valley File Lands on This Desk
Who asks, and what they are usually stuck on.
A judgment that outlived its address
Enforcement stalled on a stale string
A summons with nowhere to go
Service failing before a deadline
Counsel short one party
A defendant or witness gone quiet
Property managers, post-tenancy
A departed occupant with a balance
A relative who moved on
Family contact lost over years
A grower’s counterparty
A hauler or buyer who stopped answering
The boundary that applies to four of those six
A locate is not a consumer report. Nothing we produce for a Fresno property manager, an employer or a lender may be used to decide whether to rent to somebody, whether to hire them, or how to price their credit. We are not a consumer reporting agency, we do not furnish consumer reports, and an address developed out of the Recorder’s index and a court file is not eligibility information under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. If the decision in front of you is a tenancy application, a hire or an underwriting call, what you need is an FCRA-regulated screening provider – and we will say so and decline, rather than hand you something that looks close enough to use.
The lawful side of the same line is the one we do work. Enforcing a judgment against a former occupant, serving a defendant, locating a witness, finding an heir, identifying a counterparty who stopped answering the phone: those are ordinary, legitimate reasons to develop a current address, and they are not decisions about a consumer’s eligibility for anything. Every matter opens with the requester stating a permissible purpose, and matters that cannot state one do not open.
The Lines We Hold on a Valley File
Stated in advance, because the time to find out is not afterwards.
Safety comes before the search
If the person you are asking about left because of domestic violence, is protected by a restraining order out of the B. F. Sisk Courthouse, or holds a substitute address through Safe at Home, the confidential address programme the California Secretary of State administers, we do not develop their residence, and we tell you that rather than quietly working around it. That is not a formality and it is not a way of turning down business we do not want; it is where the record stops being a research question and becomes somebody’s safety.
It is worth knowing that California has already built the lawful route for the situation people usually raise in reply, which is a case that genuinely has to be served. Government Code section 6206(a)(5) makes a Safe at Home participant’s application a designation of “the Secretary of State as agent for purposes of service of process and for the purpose of receipt of mail.” Service is made by delivering the papers to the address confidentiality programme’s own personnel at the Secretary of State’s office, and the statute requires that they be forwarded so the participant receives them “within three days.” The chapter that contains it – Government Code section 6206 – covers victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, child abduction and elder or dependent adult abuse. So the answer to “but I have to serve them” is a real one, and it does not require anybody to find a protected address. Ask us for that route and we will point you at it. Ask us to defeat it and we decline the matter.
How the research is done, and how it is not
Everything above is built from records that are open to be read for a stated lawful purpose: recorded instruments, court files, business filings, licence registers, and data licensed under the rules that govern it. Nobody here telephones a Valley packing house pretending to be a relative, and nobody talks their way past a records clerk with a false identity – a locate built on a lie is worthless to the person who commissioned it the moment anyone examines how it was obtained. We do not open private financial accounts and we do not report their contents. We do not conduct physical surveillance: this is a public-records research firm and nobody on this team holds a California private investigator’s licence, nor do we claim one on this page.
We also try to be plain about uncertainty. Where a Valley trail runs out, “we could not confirm a current residence” is a real answer and we give it. What we will not do is present the best-looking of several unconfirmed candidates as though the record supported it, because in a region where three people in one town can share a surname and a decade of birth years, an unqualified address is how the wrong door gets knocked on.
What This Firm Will Put Its Name To
Every address we hand back on a Valley file can be walked to the counter it came from – a Fresno Recorder instrument, a B. F. Sisk case number, a fictitious business name on file with the County Clerk, or a licensed data record with a date on it. Where the trail ends at a mailing address nobody sleeps at, that is what we report, in those words. Where a finding rests on a single source, we label it as one. Lawful records research since 2004, under a stated permissible purpose, with the boundaries above applying to every matter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which counties do you treat as the Central Valley?
The eight the Legislature named. Health and Safety Code section 40600(a) describes an air district formed by the Counties of Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Merced, San Joaquin, Stanislaus and Tulare, and then defines it as consisting of seven of those whole counties plus that portion of Kern within the San Joaquin Valley Air Basin. Kern is the only one that joins in part. We say so because the alternative definition is much narrower: the federal Fresno metropolitan area is only Fresno and Madera counties, and a figure quoted for “the Fresno area” is usually a two-county figure.
Is the Fresno County Clerk the same office as the Recorder?
No, and Fresno is unusual in that respect. It is the only one of the eight Valley counties where Recorder is a department by itself. The Recorder holds recorded instruments and vital certificates at 1250 Van Ness Avenue; the separately-run County Clerk / Registrar of Voters holds marriage licences, notary and professional registrations and fictitious business name filings, and works by appointment. Madera, Merced, Kings, Tulare, Stanislaus and San Joaquin all combine the functions under one office name; Kern splits them differently again, pairing the Recorder with the Assessor.
Why can’t I see a Fresno eviction case that was just filed?
Because Code of Civil Procedure section 1161.2 shuts the file. The court’s own portal states that unlawful detainer cases are not available for sixty days after the complaint is filed. Inside that window the clerk may show the file to a party or their attorney, to a resident who proves residency, on a court order for good cause, or to a person who supplies the names of a plaintiff and a defendant together with the address of the premises including the unit number. That last route is circular for anyone doing a locate, since the address is what you were trying to establish.
Can a court records search confirm I have the right person?
Not on its own, and Fresno documents exactly why. The bulk case index the court sells is governed by the California Rules of Court, and the court’s page states that social security number, financial, warrant, victim and witness information, ethnicity, age, gender, government identification number, driver’s licence number and date of birth must all be excluded from indexes. Date of birth is the field that usually separates same-name candidates, so identity has to be anchored from recorded documents and licensed data instead, then checked against the index rather than derived from it.
Where is the Fresno County Recorder now?
At 1250 Van Ness Avenue in downtown Fresno, with free customer parking. The office carries a notice on its own site that it has moved and is no longer in the Hall of Records, so older guides that send you there are out of date. Recorded documents are public records and can be researched and viewed in the office at no charge, with an in-person index kiosk on the second floor; copies can also be ordered online through the county’s records portal. The office handles more than two hundred distinct document types.
Which Fresno courthouse would my civil file be in?
Almost certainly the B. F. Sisk Courthouse at 1130 O Street, which the court’s own directory lists as taking civil limited and unlimited, small claims, unlawful detainer, probate and conservatorship, family law and restraining orders. The Van Ness Avenue courthouse is criminal and juvenile dependency, “M” Street takes infractions, Departments 95 and 96 sit at the Jail Annex on M Street, and closed files go to the Archives on “E” Street. Three of those are within a few blocks of each other, which is why “downtown” is not a useful instruction.
Do you locate someone who is hiding from an abuser?
No. If the person left because of domestic violence, is protected by a restraining order, or holds a substitute address through Safe at Home – the confidential address programme run by the California Secretary of State – we decline to develop their residence and we say why. Where a matter genuinely has to be served, California already provides the route: Government Code section 6206(a)(5) designates the Secretary of State as the participant’s agent for service of process, with the papers delivered to the programme’s own staff and forwarded to reach the participant within three days. That works without anyone locating a protected address.
Can I use your Fresno report to screen a rental applicant?
No. This firm is not a consumer reporting agency, a locate is not a consumer report, and an address developed out of a recorder’s index and a court file is not eligibility information under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. So nothing in a Fresno report may be used to decide a tenancy, a hire, or the pricing of credit or insurance. Locating a former occupant to enforce a judgment or complete service is a different thing entirely and is a normal engagement. If your decision is a tenancy, a hire or underwriting, use an FCRA-regulated screening provider.
Start a Central Valley Locate
Send us the name, whatever addresses the file already carries however stale they look, and the lawful purpose behind the request. We will tell you which of those addresses is a residence, which is a mail drop, and which county’s records we need to open next – typically with a first read back within 24 hours. Contact us to open a matter.
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