Who Are My Neighbors? Everything You Need to Know

Michelle Wilson - April 25, 2024

Whether you move to a new area or want to learn more about your community, it’s a good idea to know who your neighbors are. While you may see them in passing or even know their name, that doesn’t always tell you the full story. In fact, your neighbors might be hiding something or lying to you about some of their information.

Regardless of the reason, it’s a good idea to know who your neighbors are beyond just a name exchange and some pleasantries.

The good news is that we’re here to help. If you’re wondering who your neighbors are, you’re in the right place because CheckPeople.com makes finding information about your neighbors a breeze. Plus, all you need to get started is their name, address, or phone number, so you don’t even need that much information to start your search.

Read on to learn more below.

Can You Look up Your Neighbors?

You can look up information about your neighbors freely, and we highly encourage you to do so. Most of the information about them is public records because information about addresses is available in public databases.

Phone numbers are also public records, so you can look for them in the Whitepages or run a search on their phone number. For these reasons, you shouldn’t have any problems looking up more information about your neighbors. Ultimately, it comes down to looking in the right places to make sure you have access to the full picture.

Is Looking up Your Neighbors Legal?

Looking up information about your neighbors is completely legal. You never have to worry about running out and getting in trouble for doing so as long as you’re not stalking them or searching for them when they requested that you didn’t. It’s legal for you to Google their name, run a people search, or use other tools like Whitepages.

However, the legality of looking up your neighbor can get tricky if you use them as babysitters for your children. In these cases, your neighbor would be considered domestic help.

To run a background check on someone who provides domestic help, you have to work with a verified company. While this isn’t how it works in every state, it’s worth checking with the Federal Trade Commission to determine what some regulations might look like.

What Information Can You Find About Your Neighbors?

You can find a lot of information about your neighbors when you use the right tools. When you run a search with CheckPeople.com, for example, you can view anything that’s a public record. You can also find this information online by using other tools like Google or social media.

That said, when looking up information about your neighbors, you can reveal their:

• Full name
• Address and other addresses
• Relatives
• Marriage or divorce records
• Court records
• Criminal records
• Social media accounts
• Dating profiles
• Friends
• Arrest records

Depending on your neighbor, you may find some of this information or a lot more. Ultimately, what you find depends on what someone’s public records look like. Therefore, it’s not always as simple as seeing the same thing each time.

5 Reasons Why You Should Know Who Your Neighbors Are

Knowing who your neighbors are is important. While it’s nice to know someone’s a good person or to know someone’s name to invite them to a block party, there are also other reasons to know your neighbors. For example, it’s important to know if a sex offender is in your area, especially if you have children.

Additionally, you might want to know if your neighbors are felons or if they’re not who they say they are. Most people in the United States are good people, but it never hurts to know your neighbors.

Learn more about why you should know who your neighbors are below.

1. Having Extra Hands and Forming a Community

We’ll start with something light-hearted. There’s a saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and more often than not, it’s a true statement. Whether your child forgets their house key when walking home or you need a babysitter for a young child, having help from your neighbors can be a game changer.

We don’t recommend handing your child off to a neighbor that you just met, but it’s a good idea to build a relationship with them over time, if you like them, of course.

Knowing your neighbors can also be beneficial if you don’t have young children. They can help you watch your house or apartment if you’re out of town for an extended period. They can also help you maintain your property and keep an eye on your things at night if you work different shifts.

Ultimately, it helps to know your neighbors because you can help each other out – even if it’s something simple like having a spare key handy.

2. Being Social and Joining a Community

There’s nothing worse than loneliness. People who are lonely experience more depression and other mental health issues, so having friends in your community can prevent you from dealing with loneliness.

Even if you’re not lonely, moving to a new area and not knowing anyone can be stressful, so it’s always a good idea to get to know your neighbors. What’s more, they can invite you to events and outings to help you meet even more people.

Many towns, buildings, and streets have social media groups that communicate about what’s going on. So, if you’re looking for a sense of community, we recommend getting to know your neighbors.

Knowing your neighbors can also help your children be more social. Block parties and helping your children make friends with other kids in the neighborhood can improve their mental health and general well-being.

3. Safety for You and the Neighborhood

Moving away from some of the more positive reasons to know your neighbors, your safety is a good reason to know who you live with.

Whether you live in an apartment building or on a suburban street, knowing that your neighbors are well-behaved and safe people can help you sleep at night. This becomes even more important if you have young children who will be playing outside or around them.

When it comes to safety there are two main things you should consider; sex offender status and criminal records – this is like background check 101.

Once you know your neighbor’s name, address, or phone number you can run them through a background check service to view their criminal records, arrest records, court records, and sex offender status. This can help you determine if it’s worth moving next to them or if your neighbors are people you can trust.

Aside from keeping your family safe from your neighbors, you can also make your neighborhood safe by knowing your neighbors. If your neighbors agree with you, you can establish a neighborhood watch to help everyone stay safe. Therefore, safety doesn’t always have to be for you and your family – it can be for the community.

4. Learning About a Community

When you plan on moving somewhere, it’s a good idea to learn more about the neighborhood. While you can drive past the house or check in with your landlord to learn more about other tenants, this doesn’t always cut it.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to make a list of addresses that are close to you and run an address lookup on those addresses. Doing so will ensure that you know the type of people you’re going to be living around.

A people search can help you determine if people are safe to live around or if they might be too old or young for your preferences. For example, a young couple might not want to move to a neighborhood that has an older community because there might not be a lot to do in the area.

Another example is that if you find that a few people have criminal records or that there is a sex offender in the neighborhood, you can avoid moving there. For these reasons, knowing who your neighbors are before you move there can be a big help in making the right decision to purchase a property or rent a unit in an apartment building.

5. Getting Contact Information

Contact information is important if you want to learn more about your neighbors. While it won’t tell you anything about their personal lives, it can be a good starting point for you to get in touch with them.

We recommend learning their name, address, or phone number to get started, but this depends on the information you have available. For example, if you don’t know their name you can run an address search to learn their name. On the other hand, if you don’t have their phone number, you can run a search using their name to find their number.

Getting contact information can be about more than talking to someone. One specific use for learning about your neighbors this way is to avoid any awkward interactions. If they have already told you their name or given you their phone number, it would be awkward or even rude to keep asking them.

How CheckPeople.com Can Help You Learn More About Your Neighbors

CheckPeople.com has three tools that can help you learn more about your neighbors. There is a people search tool, an address search tool, and even a phone lookup tool.

All of these tools will generate a report, so you don’t have to worry about one tool being more or less effective than another one. For this reason, the tool that you decide to use depends on the information that you have. Learn more about our people search options below.

People Search

Running a people search is always the best way to learn about your neighbors. All you need to get started is someone’s name and address, but you can even get by with just their name.

To get started, head over to our people search service. Once you arrive at the page, enter their name and other information you know about them. This may include their address and state. Then, you can begin your search.

The entire process takes about 10 minutes, but you might have to enter more information to narrow down the search results. We may ask you about their relatives or whether or not you know about their criminal history. You don’t have to answer all of these questions, but it does narrow down the results.

Once you find the right person, you can agree to the terms of the search and open the full report to learn more about your neighbors.

When you run a people search with CheckPeople.com, you’ll find anything that’s a public record. This can range from identity verification to sex offender status and everywhere in between.

Address Lookup

Another tool that we offer is our address lookup tool. This is a simple tool that allows you to learn more about someone with an address. It’s also known as a reverse address lookup tool and it works well if an address is what you plan on using to search for information about your neighbors.

So, if you don’t know your neighbor’s name or phone number, you’re not dead in the water – just enter their address into the search tool instead. The results will be the same as our other tools, but the primary results will give you information about the home.

You can find out when your neighbors moved in, how much it’s worth, and what the property taxes look like. While this might seem like overkill, you can use this to your advantage if you want to move to a new area.

Phone Lookup

One of the best ways to learn more about your neighbors is with a phone lookup tool. It’s one of the few tools online that can help you learn information about someone with only their phone number; these tools may also be referred to as reverse phone lookup tools. We recommend going this route if you don’t know your neighbor’s name.

Our phone lookup tool makes it easy to enter someone’s phone number into a search tool. Then, when you click Search, you can learn more about them. You’ll have to agree to the terms and conditions of the search and answer prompts that narrow down the results.

Once the phone lookup process is complete, you can open the full report. When you open the full report, you’ll find anything about them that’s public record. This can include their name, criminal history, dating profiles, social media accounts, and much more.

While this method is effective, it will only work if you have someone’s phone number, so keep this in mind.

Background Check and Arrest Records

At CheckPeople.com, we offer a comprehensive background check tool. You can enter someone’s name, state, and address to find information about their criminal records and arrest records.

Using the background check tool will give you a general background check result, with the full report’s priority being identity verification and criminal records searches. Background checks are one of the best ways to learn about your neighbors because they can reveal any criminal history that your neighbors might have.

Aside from background checks, CheckPeople.com also offers an arrest records search tool. It’s similar to the background check tool but with an emphasis on arrest records.

If you’ve found that your neighbor has been arrested, you can leverage this tool to find out details about the arrest. You can learn about when it happened, who cases it, and what the proceedings for the case were.

What Are the Other Ways to Learn More About Your Neighbors?

CheckPeople.com is the best tool you can use to find information about your neighbors. However, it’s not the only method.

If you want to start your search with other tools, you can visit local databases, reach out to them, or even join social media groups. Many of these methods can even be used after you learn about them with one of our tools because they can help you make your relationship much deeper.

Social Media Searches

Once you know a little bit about your neighbor, you can search for them on social media. Searching for them on social media can help you get a better understanding of who they are.

Social media platforms like LinkedIn are perfect for learning about what your neighbors do for work. On the other hand, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram can help you see the type of person they are based on their photos.

Some social media platforms are even great for connecting with the whole community. Once you know a few of your neighbors, you can look for Facebook groups in your neighborhood and join them. These groups can help you connect with other neighbors and learn more about what a community does for fun.

Facebook groups and groups on other social media platforms can also be beneficial to check before you move to an area. It can help you determine if it’s the right community for you.

Visit Your County Government Website

Most counties will have a website that’s connected to a database of information about addresses. You can find a list of homeowners by visiting the website for your county and reviewing the information. This is something you can do in-person or online, so you don’t have to visit their website if you don’t feel like navigating through a database.

Some counties will also let you call them if you want to learn more about your neighbors. You’ll have to provide a good reason over the phone because sometimes employees won’t want to release information to strangers without a reason. This depends on your location and the county office.

Google Search

Sometimes, a good old Google search can be enough to help you learn more about your neighbors. Google is one of the largest search engines in the world, and it’s home to hundreds of billions of webpages. It organizes information well and there’s a reason that millions of people turn to Google for search results.

So, Google is a great tool that you can leverage if you need to find information about someone. All you need is their name, address, or phone number to get started.

While Google is an effective way to learn more about your neighbors, it’s not perfect. The problem lies in how vast the search engine can be. You can enter someone’s name, for example, and you might find thousands of people with the same name. This can be true for their address as well if you’re missing the exact street number, town, or street.

While you can Google someone once you learn more about them, we recommend using a dedicated people search engine instead for the best results.

If you do want to stick with Google you can try an advanced Google search. Advanced Google searches are more refined and will help you pull information about a specific query.

Reach Out to Them

The classic method for learning more about who your neighbors are is as good as any. If you don’t mind a little bit of awkwardness, you can try reaching out to them.

Whether it’s bringing a casserole to their door or sending them a letter, getting in touch with them is a great way to learn more about them. Even striking up a conversation with them in passing can be a helpful way to learn more about your neighbors. If you have your neighbors’ phone numbers, you can also call them or text them to learn more about them.

While reaching out to your neighbors is a great way to learn more, if you don’t want to go down this path you don’t have to. If you know their name, address, or phone number, you can use our people search tools to learn more about neighbors.

Participate in the Community

Most neighborhoods will have community events, organizations, and meetings.

Not everyone will attend these meetings or events but joining your local Chamber of Commerce or participating in other events can help you learn more about your neighbors. In fact, this is one of the best ways to learn more about some of your neighbors that don’t live right next to your home.

Participation in the community can also help you make new friends and get more comfortable in your neighborhood. If you don’t know of any events, you can send out flyers or contact people in other ways to organize them yourself – even a block party can be enough!

You don’t always have to stick to these rules, either. If you know that your neighbors like live music or something similar, you can organize events that have the entertainment they like.

Ultimately, the goal is to get members of your community involved because it will help you learn more about each person. This is a slow process, so it doesn’t hurt to start by using one of our people search tools.

Learn More About Your Neighbors With CheckPeople.com

You should always know everything you can about your neighbors, even if you haven’t moved into a new apartment or house. Knowing more information about your neighbors can help you make decisions about whether or not it’s a good place for you to live or if you should skip renting or buying somewhere altogether.

While you can always ask your neighbors about themselves and get to know them over time, this method can take years, and people may still try to hide things from you.

For this reason, we recommend verifying their identity and running a background check on your neighbors with CheckPeople.com. The whole process takes less than 10 minutes, and it can give you peace of mind that you’re making the right choice.

Plus, you’ll know whether or not your neighbors are someone you want to associate with or have around your children. Ultimately, it doesn’t hurt to learn more about your neighbors.