How to Find Someone Living in an ADU or In-Law Unit
An accessory dwelling unit is a complete second home sitting on somebody else’s tax parcel. The county knows about the parcel and about one owner. The Postal Service may or may not treat the back unit as a place mail can go. The occupant frequently holds no lease anyone filed, no separate meter and no address a validation service will accept – so a search for them returns the person who owns the house out front and stops dead. The record that usually does know a second household exists is the building permit, and almost nobody looks there. This page shows you what each record on that parcel actually holds, in what order to open them, and where the paper genuinely runs out.
The Short Version
Stop asking the deed. In California an accessory dwelling unit may be rented separately from the main house but, with two narrow exceptions, may not be sold separately from it – so in the ordinary case no deed for the back unit will ever exist and the recorder’s index has one owner for the whole parcel. Go to the building department instead. A second kitchen, a second bathroom and a second exterior door are permit-triggering work, and permit files are commonly searchable by address, carry the applicant, the description, the inspection history and the year, and reach back decades further than any commercial database. Then settle the address question before you trust a single database result. Whether the unit has a designator, a fraction, its own street number or nothing at all is a local decision, and the Postal Service’s approved list contains no word for “cottage” or “in-law”. Check the meter last but weight it heavily – whether a separate utility account can even exist is often decided by statute rather than by the household, and a shared meter means the utility record still names the owner no matter who lives out back.
Watch: Why the Property Search Names the Wrong Person
A short walk through the parcel problem and the one record that usually noticed the second household.
Short video guide
One Tax Parcel, One Owner of Record, Two Separate Households
The property record is not wrong about the back unit. It was never asked about it.
County land records are organized around parcels, and a parcel is a unit of taxation and conveyance rather than a unit of habitation. One legal description, one assessment, one owner of record, one tax bill. When a garage becomes a studio with a shower in it, or a bedroom over the kitchen becomes a self-contained apartment with its own door to the driveway, nothing about that description changes. The parcel is the same shape it was. So a name search of the grantor-grantee index for the person living out back comes up empty, and a reverse address search comes back with the person on the deed – who is a real answer to a question you did not ask.
California states the reason for this outright rather than leaving it to be inferred. Its accessory dwelling unit chapter was recodified into the Government Code in 2024, and Government Code § 66314(d)(1) sets the rule a records searcher needs to know: the accessory dwelling unit may be rented separate from the primary residence, but shall not be sold or otherwise conveyed separate from it, except as provided in a narrow article added at the end of the chapter. Read that as a records statement and it is decisive. Renting generates no recorded instrument. Selling is what generates a deed. The statute permits the thing that leaves no trace in the recorder’s office and forbids, in the ordinary case, the thing that would leave one.
The definition itself is worth quoting for how emphatically it describes a whole separate life. Under Government Code § 66313(a), an accessory dwelling unit provides “complete independent living facilities for one or more persons” with permanent provisions for living, sleeping, eating, cooking and sanitation – and it sits on the same parcel as the primary dwelling. The same section defines a junior accessory dwelling unit as no more than 500 square feet of interior livable space contained entirely within a single-family residence, which may have separate sanitation facilities or may share them with the rest of the house. That is a household of its own, with its own front door and its own kitchen, that a floor plan would show as part of somebody’s home and that a property record cannot distinguish from a spare room.
The two doors that do lead to a recorded document
They exist, they are narrow, and they are worth checking because when either applies the occupant’s name is suddenly in the county index. Government Code § 66341 requires a local agency to allow separate sale to a qualified buyer where the unit or the primary dwelling was built by a qualified nonprofit corporation, an enforceable land-use restriction is recorded, and the property is held under a recorded tenancy in common agreement allocating each buyer an undivided, unequal interest sized to the dwelling they occupy. A grant deed naming grantor and grantee is recorded, with a Preliminary Change of Ownership Report filed at the same time. Separately, § 66342 lets a local agency adopt an ordinance permitting the house and the accessory unit to be conveyed as condominiums, created under the Davis-Stirling Common Interest Development Act and in conformance with the Subdivision Map Act, with a safety inspection before the condominium plan is recorded. Both routes are uncommon. Both produce exactly what a searcher wants. Neither will surface on a plain deed search unless you look by instrument type.
Washington reaches a similar place from a different direction. RCW 36.70A.681 tells cities and counties inside an urban growth area that they must allow at least two accessory dwelling units on every lot in every zoning district that allows single-family homes – one attached and one detached, two attached, or two detached in one or two structures. It also says a jurisdiction may not require the owner of the lot to reside in the accessory unit or in any other housing unit on the same lot, and may not prohibit the separate sale of a condominium unit purely because it started life as an accessory unit. Put those together and a single Washington parcel can lawfully hold three households, none of whom is the owner, with one name on the deed. We read these provisions in the published California and Washington codes and nowhere else, and the rules elsewhere differ; treat any other state as an open question until you have read its own statute.
The land record still earns its place at the start of the file, as long as you know what to take from it. It gives you the owner, which tells you whether you are dealing with a family arrangement or a landlord. It gives you the sale history, which dates the arrangement. It gives you the assessor’s building characteristics, which sometimes show a second structure, a second kitchen or an improvement value that jumped in a year no sale occurred. If the owner rather than the occupant is who you actually need, our guide to confirming whether a person owns property handles that side of the parcel directly.
The Building Permit Is Where the Second Unit First Exists on Paper
A kitchen, a bathroom and an exterior door are permitted work. That paperwork outlives everything else.
Here is the asymmetry that makes this page worth writing. The conveyance system was designed not to notice a second household, and largely succeeds. The construction permitting system was designed to notice every wall, drain, panel and egress window, and it also succeeds. So the record most likely to tell you a parcel holds two homes is a record almost nobody searching for a person ever opens.
What a permit file gives you is more than a yes. Take Seattle as a worked example, because its Department of Construction and Inspections publishes an unusually candid description of exactly what a member of the public can reach. Its research guidance for projects, permits and property sets out several distinct systems. The department’s Permit and Site History Research Tool takes an address or a point on a map and returns a site characteristics report with zoning and land-use overlays, links out to the King County Assessor and the department’s own GIS property map, and – the phrase that matters most for this problem – gives a “clear depiction of the relationship between addresses and development sites.” The Seattle Services Portal holds all permit activity from 2005 to the present, and the department lists what a record contains: the applicant team, the project description, the permit status, the inspection status, related permits, and project documents including application materials and technical reports. A separate online records library holds land use plans and projects from 2007 forward and all permits and inspections from 2005 forward. Older material has been scanned – the oldest permits from approximately 1894 to 1970, and microfiche from 1970 to 2004, all but roll film. There is a mapped view of permit activity underway, and open-data building-permit and land-use datasets going back to 2005 that can be downloaded and filtered.
Read a permit description in that context and it is often explicit about what was built: an accessory dwelling unit, a detached accessory dwelling unit, a garage conversion, an addition with a second kitchen. It carries dates, so you learn when the household became possible. It carries the applicant, which is frequently the owner but is sometimes the contractor or a family member. And because inspection records sit alongside it, you learn whether the work was finished or abandoned partway – which is a different fact about whether anybody lives there now.
Three limits, stated plainly
The permit may not exist at all. This is the honest weakness of the whole approach, and California has legislated for it. Government Code § 66311.7 tells a local agency it may not deny a permit for an unpermitted accessory dwelling unit or junior accessory dwelling unit built before January 1, 2020 on the ground that it violates building standards or does not comply with the article. A legislature does not build a route back for a category that does not exist. Washington points the same way from the other end: RCW 36.70A.681 requires jurisdictions to allow conversions from existing structures, expressly including detached garages, even where those structures violate current setback or lot-coverage requirements. Older second units in both states may have no permit file whatever, and their occupants are the hardest people on this page to document.
The date on a scan is not the date of the thing scanned. Seattle’s department states this about its own historical records in as many words: the date shown for a historical microfilm permit or plan is the date of the scanned upload, not the date associated with the contents of that scan. Sort a results list by that column and you will build a chronology that is entirely fictional. Every digitized permit archive has some version of this problem, and it is the single easiest way to date a second unit wrong by fifty years.
Plans are not the same as permits. Seattle lists most construction plans from 2007 onward as not published, obtainable only by individually written request, and excludes plans for certain buildings such as jails and infrastructure facilities from public access altogether. So you can very often learn that a second dwelling was approved without ever seeing the drawing that shows where its door is. That is usually enough. It is worth knowing in advance that it is all you will get.
One more record in the same family deserves a mention because it is specific to occupancy rather than construction: some cities operate a rental registration scheme and publish the register. Seattle publishes active rental registrations as both a map and a downloadable dataset. A single-family parcel carrying a live rental registration is telling you something a deed cannot – that somebody who is not the owner is paying to live there.
Whether the Unit Has an Address of Its Own
Three databases disagreeing about the back unit is usually three correct answers to three different questions.
There is no national rule that a second dwelling gets a second address, and the local practice varies enough that this is the question most often asked about accessory units online – by the people building them, who cannot find a straight answer either. A jurisdiction may assign a wholly separate street number, a letter suffix, a fraction, a unit designator, or nothing, and the Postal Service has the final word on whether the resulting address becomes a delivery point that mail is actually carried to.
The standards themselves are public and repay reading. The Postal Service’s Publication 28, Postal Addressing Standards, deals with unit designators at section 213. It requires a secondary address unit designator such as APARTMENT or SUITE to be printed on the mailpiece wherever the address location contains one, and prefers it at the end of the delivery address line; where the line cannot carry everything, the secondary information goes on the line immediately above. If a pound sign is used, section 213.2 requires a space between the sign and the number – and the publication discourages the pound sign entirely where the correct designation is known or appears in the ZIP+4 file. Section 213.1 lists the seven most common designators: APARTMENT as APT, BUILDING as BLDG, FLOOR as FL, SUITE as STE, UNIT as UNIT, ROOM as RM and DEPARTMENT as DEPT.
The nine designators that carry no number
Appendix C2 of the same publication holds the full approved list, and this is where accessory units live. Twenty-five entries appear on it, and nine of them are flagged as not requiring a secondary range to follow – meaning the designator alone is a complete, standards-compliant secondary address with no unit number at all. Counting them off the published list: BSMT for basement, FRNT for front, LBBY for lobby, LOWR for lower, OFC for office, PH for penthouse, REAR for rear, SIDE for side, and UPPR for upper. That is nine. Four of them – basement, lower, rear and upper – describe exactly where second units get built, which means a lawful, fully standardized US address for a backyard cottage can be nothing more than the house number, the street, and the word REAR.
Now look at what is not on that list of twenty-five. There is no COTTAGE, no IN-LAW, no GUEST HOUSE, no GRANNY FLAT and no ADU. Whatever the household calls the place they live, the postal system will render it as one of the approved terms or drop it. A person who writes “guest house” on a form is generating a variant that no address-standardization pass will match to the delivery point, and a person who writes nothing at all is generating an address indistinguishable from the main house.
Fractions are a separate mechanism and are commonly confused with designators. Publication 28 treats a fractional address at Appendix D4 as part of the primary range: 123 1/2 MAIN ST occupies seven character positions in the range field. A half address is therefore a different house number, not a subdivision of one – which is why 123 and 123 1/2 sort apart, match apart, and may sit in different records entirely while being fourteen feet from each other.
Local address history compounds all of it. Seattle’s construction department warns researchers that parcels and buildings get divided, that large sites with several buildings have had different addressing approaches over the years, that permits may therefore be filed under any of those addresses, and that old addresses are frequently retired and new ones assigned. Its remedy is worth copying anywhere: pull the parcel on the property information map, open the parcel data report, and read every address associated with the site rather than the one you arrived with. We do the equivalent as a matter of course, because treating a formatting mismatch as an absence is how a person gets written off as untraceable when they are simply filed under the other number. Our explanation of how address accuracy actually gets verified covers the corroboration we use once the variants are on the table.
What Each Record Knows About the Back Unit
Six systems touch a single suburban lot. They disagree, and each disagrees in a predictable direction.
| Record | Whose name it holds | Who keeps it | Its specific blind spot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Recorded deed and grantor-grantee index | The owner of the whole parcel, and the lender | County recorder or register of deeds | Silent on the second household unless a tenancy in common or condominium instrument was recorded |
| Assessment roll and building characteristics | The owner, tied to improvements rather than people | County assessor | Notices square footage and fixtures; never notices who sleeps in them |
| Building permit and inspection file | The applicant, often the owner or contractor | City or county building department | Nothing at all where the unit was built without a permit |
| Postal delivery point and standardized address | Nobody; it is a place, not a person | The Postal Service, through local addressing decisions | May render the unit as REAR with no number, or not recognize it at all |
| Utility account | Whoever the meter is billed to | The utility, water district or municipal provider | Names the owner wherever service is shared, which statute sometimes guarantees |
| Voter registration file | The occupant, in their own words | County auditor, clerk or registrar | Only the fields the state has made public, and only if the person registered |
| A worked file across all six | The occupant, dated and sourcedWhat we do | Us, on the purpose you state | Stops where the records stop, and says so in the report |
The pattern down that last column is what makes this a specialist problem rather than a database problem. The two records a beginner reaches for first – the deed and the reverse address lookup – are the two structurally guaranteed to return the owner. The record most likely to prove a second household exists is held by a building department, not a records office. And the only record on the list where the occupant describes their own home in their own words is one they had to volunteer for. That work sits inside our ordinary skip tracing and public-records research practice, and a good deal of it is genuinely doable yourself with the sections above if you have a name, a street address and an afternoon.
What the Meter Decides Before You Even Search
Whether a utility record for the occupant can exist is frequently settled by statute, not by the household.
A separate utility account is one of the strongest occupancy signals there is, because somebody had to put their own name and their own credit behind it. Which is why it matters that in a great many accessory units, one cannot lawfully be required to exist.
California draws the line at the type of unit. Government Code § 66311.5(b) says an accessory dwelling unit or junior accessory dwelling unit shall not be treated by a local agency, special district or water corporation as a new residential use for the purpose of calculating connection fees or capacity charges for utilities, including water and sewer, unless it was built together with a new single-family dwelling. Subdivision (d) goes further for units created inside existing space: for those, no separate utility connection between the unit and the utility may be required at all, and no related connection fee or capacity charge imposed – again unless the unit came with a new house, or the unit is separately conveyed. Subdivision (e) then carves out the other case: for an accessory unit that is not a conversion of existing space, a separate connection may be required, and the fee for it must be proportionate to the burden, calculated either on square footage or on the drainage fixture unit values defined in the Uniform Plumbing Code.
Translate that into search terms. A converted garage, a converted basement, a bedroom turned into a junior unit inside the house – these are the cases where California forbids requiring a separate connection, so the water and sewer bill almost certainly still carries the property owner’s name and the occupant has no utility record on that parcel at all. A newly built detached cottage is the case where a separate connection can be demanded, so a separate account may genuinely exist. Knowing which kind of unit you are looking at, which the permit file tells you, tells you in advance whether the utility route is worth taking. One further wrinkle: where an accessory unit is separately sold under § 66341, the statute requires it to have a separate water, sewer or electrical connection if the utility serving the main house asks for one – so the rare separately-owned unit is also the one most likely to have its own account.
Electricity is a different question again and is answered by the utility rather than the legislature, which is why the metering question generates so much argument online: whether a second panel is installed, whether it is a submeter behind the owner’s service or a separate service with its own account, and whether the utility will even open a second account at that address. A submeter is invisible outside the property. It produces a private arrangement between a parent and an adult child about the power bill, and no record anywhere.
Buried infrastructure records are a quiet third option that hardly anyone uses. Seattle, again as the worked example, keeps historic side sewer cards and maps searchable by address, parcel or card number, alongside a current water and sewer map from the city’s utility. A side sewer record showing a second lateral run to a structure at the back of a lot is physical evidence of a second dwelling, dated, from a public source, and entirely independent of whether anyone ever pulled a building permit. Where a comparable record exists in your jurisdiction it is worth the twenty minutes. Once you have a candidate address for the unit itself, the question shifts from whether it exists to who is currently in it, which is the ground covered by our guide to establishing who really lives at an address.
Where the Occupant Puts Their Own Name Down
Every record so far describes the property. This is the one where a person describes themselves.
Voter registration is the record that most often breaks this problem open, for a reason particular to accessory units: the registrant writes their own residential address, and they write it the way they experience it. Somebody living in a converted garage frequently registers with a unit designator, a letter, or a description that the assessor’s parcel record has never used and the postal file may not carry either. That mismatch, which is a nuisance everywhere else, is a signal here. It says two people gave two different descriptions of the same lot.
What you can actually see is set by state law and is narrower than most people assume. Washington is a useful illustration because its statute is unusually explicit in both directions. RCW 29A.08.710 puts the original voter registration records in the custody of the county auditor and states that the original registration form is confidential and unavailable for public inspection and copying. Then it lists what is available: the voter’s name, address, political jurisdiction, gender, year of birth, voting record, date of registration and registration number – followed by the sentence that governs everything else, that “no other information from voter registration records or files is available for public inspection or copying.” Eight fields, and the address is one of them. Signatures, dates of birth beyond the year, driver’s license and Social Security data are not. Other states publish more or less than that, and several restrict access to defined categories of requester, so the field list has to be checked wherever you are working rather than assumed from one state.
Beyond that, keep expectations modest and the list short. State driver licensing and vehicle records may carry a current residential address, but the personal information in them is restricted by federal law and released only for enumerated purposes, and licensed data compiled from those sources inherits the same conditions – so their usefulness depends entirely on whether your purpose is one the statute allows. Court filings, judgment dockets and probate matters sometimes state a party’s address as they gave it, which for an accessory unit occupant is often the only place their version of the address was ever written down. None of that is a substitute for the parcel work above; it is corroboration once you have a candidate.
There is one exclusion built into the voter file that belongs in this section rather than in a footnote, because it is the mechanism by which the law says no. Washington’s Address Confidentiality Program is reflected directly in the election statutes: under RCW 40.24.060, the county auditor mails the ballot to the participant at a substitute mailing address, and neither the name nor the address of a program participant may be included in any list of registered voters available to the public. Most states operate a comparable program. If the person you are looking for is enrolled in one, the record has been closed deliberately by a state agency at that person’s request, and the correct response is to stop – not to route around it through another source.
Six Ways a Second-Unit Search Misfires
Each of these has a tell, and each is cheaper to check for at the start than to unpick at the end.
The address search returned the homeowner
It answered correctly. One parcel, one owner of record. That result identifies the household your person is attached to – keep it and move to the permit file rather than concluding the address is wrong.
The unit was built without a permit
Common in older housing, and California legislated a route to permit units built before 2020 precisely because so many exist. There is no construction file to find; the search has to run on occupancy records instead.
The address exists in four incompatible forms
The house number alone, the number with REAR, a letter suffix, and a half-fraction that sorts as a different property. Search one form and you have silently excluded the other three.
The utilities were never separated
Where the unit was carved out of existing space, statute may forbid requiring a separate connection. No separate account means no utility record for the occupant, however long they have lived there.
The permit archive dated the work by its scan
Digitized historical permits are frequently stamped with the day they were uploaded rather than the day they were issued. Sort on that column and your entire timeline is wrong by decades.
The parcel was readdressed years ago
Buildings get divided and old numbers retired. The permit for the unit may sit under an address the property has not used since the 1970s, which is why every associated address for the site has to be read, not just the current one.
How We Work a Two-Household Parcel
Four steps in this sequence, because each one tells the next what it is looking for.
You give us the street address and the reason
The name, the address in whatever form reached you, anything you were told about the arrangement, the city and county, roughly when the information was current, and what the search is for. Covered uses and safety concerns are raised at this point, not after an invoice.
We establish whether the parcel holds two homes
Assessment and recorded documents for the owner and the history, then the building department for permits, inspections and any rental registration. The aim of this step is a dated answer to whether a second dwelling exists, before anybody’s name is attached to it.
We resolve every form the address can take
Designator, suffix, fraction, retired numbers and the site’s full address history, checked against how the postal standards would render each one, so that a source returning nothing is distinguished from a source we asked in the wrong format.
You get records with dates on them
Each finding arrives with the source it came from and the date that source speaks to, plus a written statement of what we could not establish. Where the paper will not support a confident answer, the report says that rather than rounding it up.
The Lines We Hold on a Search Like This
This subject makes one shortcut unusually tempting, so the refusals sit here in the body rather than in small print.
We are a skip tracing and public-records research firm. Nobody on this team holds a private investigator’s license, and we never describe ourselves as investigators in that sense. No one here sits in a car on the street, photographs a garden, follows anyone, or knocks on a door. Every search runs on a lawful purpose that you state before the work begins and that we record next to the result, and where a source is regulated – motor-vehicle records, licensed data drawn from restricted sources – we use it only where a permitted use genuinely covers your request.
We do not use pretext, and on this topic the specific temptation has a name. There is a person who knows the answer with certainty, who is easy to reach, and who is standing thirty feet from the unit: the homeowner. So, precisely – nobody here telephones or approaches a property owner posing as a prospective tenant asking whether the back unit is available, as a delivery driver with a package for the person out back, as a utility employee needing to read a meter, as a contractor quoting for work, as a census or survey taker, or as a relative. We do not do it, we do not hire anybody to do it, and we will not talk a client through doing it themselves. This matters more here than almost anywhere else because the owner is very often the occupant’s own parent or child, and a lie told to a mother about her son is not made harmless by being told for a legitimate case. We also do not reach into private financial accounts – no balances, no statements, no transaction histories, no access of any kind.
We are not a consumer reporting agency and what we produce is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That distinction does real work on a page about second dwellings, because two requests that arrive in almost the same words fall on opposite sides of it. Locating a former occupant who owes an existing balance, or a party who has to be served, is recovery and litigation-support work, and we take it. Deciding whether somebody should be allowed to rent the unit – checking their rental history, their previous addresses, whether other owners had trouble with them – is tenant screening, and that is a covered use, and it belongs with a consumer reporting agency working inside the disclosure, the written authorization and the adverse-action machinery the statute wraps around it. Employment, credit, insurance underwriting and licensing decisions all sit in that same category. Where a request genuinely needs that, our answer is to name the problem out loud and turn the work away, because a report you cannot lawfully act on is worth less to you than no report at all. An owner with a departed occupant and an unpaid balance is on the other side of that line, and our guide to tracing a tenant who left owing rent stays on the recovery side throughout.
And the request we turn down outright. A relative’s accessory unit is one of the most common places in the country for somebody to go when they need to leave a situation quickly and quietly. It is cheap or free, it comes with people who care about them, and – as this entire page has been explaining – it generates almost no records. Someone who moved into a sister’s converted garage after a protective order, or into a parent’s basement unit after a report to the police, is not hiding in any sinister sense. They are living where they can, and the invisibility is a side effect of how the property system works rather than a trick. Where a search looks like it is aimed at reaching a person who went quiet in order to be safe, whether the framing is a family emergency, an inheritance, a debt or simple concern, we decline the file and we do not take it however reasonable it sounds or whoever is asking. Requests that involve a former partner, a person subject to a protective order, or an address the requester has been told not to contact get more scrutiny at intake, not less. If you are the person who left and you think somebody is looking for you, raise it with your state’s Address Confidentiality Program, or with the court that made your order – those two channels exist precisely for this, and any research firm worth dealing with will treat both as walls rather than obstacles. On the ordinary side of that line, families genuinely do lose touch with a parent or an adult child who moved into somebody’s back unit, and our guide to reconnecting with an estranged parent covers that case on its own terms.
Everything on this page is general information about how these records are organized, and it is not legal advice. Accessory dwelling regulation, addressing, utility connection and public access to permit and voter files are all state and local law and they differ substantially – the statutory points above were read in the published codes of California and Washington and the published guidance of the City of Seattle, and are deliberately not generalized to the other forty-eight states. Where you need a remedy rather than a record – service of process, an eviction, an access order, a subpoena to a building department – that is a question for a lawyer admitted where the property sits.
Who Arrives Holding a Street Address and a Doubt
Six situations that reach us regularly, and the thing each one is usually missing.
Adult children
A parent who moved into somebody’s back unit and whose mail stopped arriving at the old house.
Papers waiting to be served
An address where the defendant is real but the door is behind the house and belongs to nobody on the deed.
Probate and estate work
An heir last known to be living in a relative’s converted garage, with nothing recorded in their name anywhere.
Homeowners themselves
An owner whose back unit was left empty by an occupant who moved on without settling anything.
Benefits and care coordinators
An older adult whose recorded address is the house while the person actually lives in the unit behind it.
Counsel with a missing party
A witness or party whose only address is a lot where the property record names somebody unrelated to the case.
What all six have in common is that they arrive knowing where the person is and unable to prove it. That is the reverse of ordinary tracing work, where the name is solid and the location is the unknown, and it is why the usual sequence has to be run backwards – establish the second dwelling first, attach a person to it second. If your problem is the ordinary shape instead, with a name and no address at all, our guide to tracing somebody who moved without leaving a forwarding address is the better starting point.
What You Can Hold Us To
Three things. Anything we tell you about who is living behind that house comes attached to the record it came out of and the date that record speaks to, so you can weigh it instead of trusting it. Where the building department has nothing, the meter is shared and the voter file is silent, you will be told exactly that, in those words, because a clean negative on a parcel is a genuinely useful result and we are not in the business of dressing one up. And nothing is obtained by anybody on this team telephoning a homeowner as somebody they are not – which is the one shortcut this particular search always offers and the one we will not take.
Questions About Second Units and the People In Them
Does an ADU have its own separate address?
Sometimes, and there is no national rule. A jurisdiction may assign the unit a wholly separate street number, a letter suffix such as A or B, a half-fraction, a unit designator, or nothing at all, and the Postal Service decides separately whether the result becomes a delivery point that mail is carried to. The practical consequence for a search is that a single accessory unit can be validly described four incompatible ways, and querying one form silently excludes the rest. Resolve every possible form of the address before you conclude that a database has no record of the person.
Why does a property search only return the homeowner?
Because the property system is organized around parcels, not households, and the accessory unit sits on the same parcel as the main house. In California, Government Code section 66314(d)(1) allows the unit to be rented separately from the primary residence but, outside two narrow exceptions, prohibits selling or conveying it separately – and it is selling that generates a deed. Renting generates nothing recordable. So the grantor-grantee index has one owner for the whole lot and no entry at all for the person living behind it, which is the correct output of the system rather than a failure of it.
How do I find building permit records for an in-law unit?
Search the city or county building department by street address, not by name. Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections is a good model of what is typically reachable: an online portal holding all permit activity from 2005 to the present with the applicant, project description, permit and inspection status, related permits and project documents; a records library adding land use material from 2007; and scanned older permits going back to approximately 1894, with microfiche covering 1970 to 2004. Read the project description carefully, since it frequently names the accessory dwelling unit or the garage conversion outright.
What if the unit was built without a permit?
Then no construction file exists and the whole permit route is closed, which is a real and common outcome rather than an edge case. California legislated a route back for exactly this population: Government Code section 66311.7 bars a local agency from denying a permit for an unpermitted accessory or junior accessory dwelling unit built before January 1, 2020 on the grounds that it breaches building standards or the article. Washington separately requires jurisdictions to allow conversions of existing structures, including detached garages, even where those structures violate current setback or lot-coverage rules. In an unpermitted case the search has to run on occupancy records rather than construction records.
Does an ADU need a separate utility meter?
In California it depends on how the unit was created, and the answer is set by statute rather than by the utility. Under Government Code section 66311.5, an accessory or junior accessory dwelling unit is not treated as a new residential use for connection fees or capacity charges unless it was built with a new house; for units created inside existing space, no separate utility connection may be required at all. For an accessory unit that is not a conversion, a separate connection may be required with a proportionate fee based on square footage or drainage fixture unit values. For a searcher this decides everything: a converted garage usually leaves the bill in the owner’s name and produces no utility record for the occupant, while a newly built detached cottage may have an account of its own.
Can voter registration records show who lives in the back unit?
Often, and it is the record where the occupant describes their own home in their own words, which is why the designator they use frequently differs from the one on the parcel record. What is visible varies by state and is narrower than people expect. Washington is explicit in both directions: the original registration form is confidential and unavailable for public inspection, while the voter’s name, address, political jurisdiction, gender, year of birth, voting record, date of registration and registration number are public, with the statute adding that no other information from those files may be inspected or copied. Check the field list for the state you are working in rather than assuming.
Will you contact the homeowner to ask who lives out back?
Not under a false identity, ever, and this is the shortcut the subject always offers. Nobody here approaches a property owner posing as a prospective tenant asking about the back unit, as a delivery driver, as a utility worker, as a contractor, as a survey taker or as a relative. The reason is not only that pretext contaminates everything obtained after it. The owner in these cases is very often the occupant’s own parent or adult child, and a lie told to a mother about her son does not become harmless because the underlying case is legitimate. Where a direct, honest approach is appropriate, that is a decision for you or your attorney to make openly.
How long does this take, and when would you refuse it?
With a street address and a name, a first pass usually comes back within 24 hours, with the honest caveat that a building department outside the main online date range can take considerably longer and that some records only arrive by written request. Two things get turned away. A request that is really tenant screening belongs with a consumer reporting agency and not with us, and a request that looks like it is trying to reach somebody who moved into a relative’s unit to get clear of the person now asking gets no file opened at all. Both of those calls are made at intake, before a cent is charged, and a protective order or a no-contact instruction sitting in the background raises the bar rather than lowering it.
Holding an Address Where Two Households Live?
Give us the name, the street address in whatever form it reached you, and the reason you need it. Plenty of these turn out to be a free permit lookup on a city website that takes an hour, and when yours is one of those we would rather say so than bill for it. The ones worth handing over are the ones where the parcel record, the construction file, the addressing history and the voter roll all have to be read against each other before any of them means anything. Describe the property to us and you will know which kind you have before you have spent a cent.
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