People sign up for my training program and I like to mail out a thank you card. But sometimes they come back undeliverable. Is there a way to tell in advance if a street address is legitimate?
If you think about it, planning ahead for growth in communities has made street addresses a jumbled mess. Some cities actually have unique street address numbers (that is, there’s a 123 Main, but there’s then never a 123 anything else in the city) while others like to use big number to suggest the street is bigger and more established (1 Lee Hill Road is apparently less cool than 750 Lee Hill Road, for example). And then there’s spacing too: On my small street our individually owned houses are 8 numbers apart, so while I’m 7588, my immediately adjacent neighbor is 7594.
And one more wrinkle: even on one side of the street, odd on the other. Oh, and make sure you plan ahead for growth because that one big ranch might someday be a dozen condos, each owner wanting their own proper street address too!
It’s crazy complicated, and so it’s no wonder that it’s hard to predict street addresses. I mean, you could just pop them into something like Google Maps, but if I look for the address 1599 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC, Google Maps is happy to show me where it is:
Street view is a bit confusing: is it the media of Pennsylvania Ave? On the other hand, if it is legit, then street view shows you if it’s a dwelling, a post office (if it’s a po box), an office building or even a Dairy Queen drive-thru!
A smarter way to validate a street address, however, is to use the US Postal Service zipcode lookup. Unlike Google Maps, the US Postal Service knows if an address is legit:
Notice the text in red: “The address you provided is not recognized by the US Postal Service as an address we serve. Mail sent to this address may be returned.”. Note that by looking at the address next door – 1600 Pennsylvania Ave — we find that it is deliverable, get the proper street address (it’s actually 1600 Pennsylvania Ave SE) and the 9-digit zip:
The mailing industry details are geeky fun too. A click and you can even see what mail router covers that address:
I have no idea what any of that means, so don’t worry if it’s all Greek to you too!
And that address, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave SE, Washington DC? Rings a bell? Let’s ask Google Maps what’s there:
There ya go! 1600 is the White House. 1599 is, uh, an undeliverable spot along a road.
Now you know how to validate addresses: Just use the US Postal Service online tools.
We build homes in new developments in the City of Los Angeles. All our streets are approved by the City and we manually verify them with local PO branch. However it takes months for our owners to be confident that deliveries from pizza to Fed Ex to Amazon will find them Also in one case a call to the police didn’t bring up the address – directions had to be given. This is one of our top customer service complaints. Google mapmaker would need to be done by each home owner and requires you to “name” the location – even if the catagory is “home”. Any advice on how to get ahead of it for our home owners?
Appreciate any feedback!
Too bad my entire town fails to verify *any* address. Makes it a pain to order things online at times.
(And, until recently, Google Maps had the wrong zipcode for the town.)