What is Residential Address?
How do you define residential address?
What are the essential elements you should know!
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What does residential address mean and why is it so important!!
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Table of Contents
What Is Residential Address
A “residential address”, to put it very simply, is the address where you live (your “residence”).
The address that you give your family and friends to visit you or for someone to deliver a package directly to you is your residential address.
Different people may call a residential address in different ways, such as:
- Residence address
- Home mailing address
- Current residential address
- Home address
- Residential mailing address
No matter how you call it, your residential address is the place where you live, sleep, and carry out your personal affairs.
To better understand this, let’s define both terms “residential” and “address” to illustrate their meaning.
Residential Definition
What does residential mean?
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, residential is defined as follows:
Used as a residence or by residents
Then, to follow the logic, the residence is defined as:
The act or fact of living or regularly staying at or in some place for the discharge of a duty or the enjoyment of a benefit
In other words, residential refers to a place that is regularly “used” for “living” or “staying”.
Address Definition
What does address mean?
According to the Collins dictionary, address is defined as:
Your address is the number of the house, flat, or apartment and the name of the street and the town where you live or work.
In other words, your address is the “number” of your house or the “name” of your street along with the town where you live or work.
Residential Address Definition
Putting all the definitions together, we can define residence address as:
- The number, street and city coordinates
- Of the place where you live and are physically located
The phrase residential address is composed of two terms, residential and address.
Residential refers to the fact that it’s a place where you habitually live or stay and address refers to the location of the residence such as house number, city, town, etc.
Why Is Residential Address Important
The residential address is important from a delivery perspective.
There are instances where public carriers are not able to deliver a package to your residential home whereas in most cases, they could.
For example, if you live in a rural community where all mail is centralized, the delivery of your mail or packages may not be done at your residence but at a central mail pickup location.
It’s also possible that you live in a newly built area and your residential address is still not recorded in the residential mail database used by your postal service carrier.
In that case, you may need to find an alternative place to have your mail delivered to you.
The reason why residential address deliveries are advantageous (in most cases) is that you are able to receive your shipment, parcel, letter, or mail directly where you live.
Otherwise, you may need to contact your local carrier to see what other mailing options you may have.
How To Find A Residential Address
How do you find a residential address?
The most common way of looking up for someone is to search online or look into phone books.
One place you can go to find a person’s address is Whitepages.com.
This is an old online database allowing you to search for someone’s address in the United States and where you may find addresses and phone numbers for free.
If you don’t have the person’s name but have the phone number, you can do a reverse lookup.
You have the option of doing a “reverse phone” search where you enter a person’s landline number or mobile phone to see if you find anything.
Aside from the Whitepages, you can also look into the Yello Pages to find someone’s residential address.
Depending on the search options, you may be able to locate a person’s residential address.
Alternatively, you may be able to find at what address a person is residing by looking them up on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or other social media networks the person may have a profile.
There are also some websites such as classmates.com, pipl.com, reunion.com that may be viable options.
Another option is to look in the good old phone book available in print (although it may be difficult to find one these days as most searches and residential address lookups are now done online).
Residential Address vs Mailing Address
What is the difference between residence address and mailing address?
Your mailing address is an address that can be separate from your residential address where you receive your mail.
For example, imagine that you have a Post Office Box (also known as PO Box) where you get your mail, that’s a “mailing address” and not a “residential address”.
A PO Box cannot be your residential address as you do not live in the facility where you are renting a post office box (generally located at your local post office).
When you live somewhere and that’s where you get your mail, then, your mailing address and residence address are going to be the same.
However, when you have a mailing address different than your residence address, it means that you receive your mail at a location other than your home (or where you live).
Residential address on the other hand specifically refers to the address of your home or the place you are generally staying.
When you use a mailing address, your objective is to have people send something to you in the mail.
When you use your residential address, your objective is for something to find where you are physically living or located.
If you get (or want to get) your mail at the same address where you live, then your residential address and mailing address will be one and the same.
Residential Address vs Home Address
What is the difference between a residential address and home address?
In reality, residential address and home address, in most cases are used interchangeably.
As a result, we can consider that the reference your residential mailing address or your home mailing address is the same.
Perhaps a slight distinction is that residential address may be slightly broader in scope than home address but in practice, the nuance may not be that important.
For instance, someone can qualify their address as their “home” as they may own the place or feel that it’s their home whereas a person may qualify their address as a “residential” address as they are currently living there for some time but it’s not truly the place where they can call home.
The net of the matter is that whether you are saying home address or residential address, you are giving the coordinates of the place where someone can physically find you.
Residential Address Examples
Let’s look at an example of residential addresses to better illustrate the concept.
Example 1: Different Residential Address And Mailing Address
Imagine that you live in an apartment in New York and the address is 123 My Street West, New York, NY 12345.
Since you are planning to travel several times this year, you go to your local post office and rent out a PO Box located directly in the post office facility (PO Box 123, Other Street East, New York, NY, 56789.
Based on this, we can say that your residential address is 123 My Street Wet as that’s where you live.
However, when you are out of town, you can have people send your mail directly to your PO Box where someone at the local post office can receive your mail and where your mail will remain safe until you come back.
In that case, your PO Box is considered to be your mailing address.
Example 2: Same Residential Address And Mailing Address
Let’s look at a second example where a person has the same residential and mailing address.
Imagine that you live at 123 Your Home Street, in New York and you have a mailbox where you receive your mail.
Your home is the only place where you receive mail.
In this case, your house address is both your residential address and mailing address.
If you happen to be shopping online and you are asked to give your residential address vs your mailing address, you can give the same address for both.
Residence Address Takeaways
So there you have it folks!
What is a residential address?
Can you have a different mailing and residential address?
Is my mailing address my home address?
When you hear someone say my residence address or my residential address, they are referring to the address where they are currently living.
When you hear someone say my home address or your home address, the person is also referring to where you are currently living (same as residential address).
And when you hear someone say my mailing address or ask what is your mailing address, the person is referring to an address where you will want to specifically receive your mail (can be a PO Box, business address, work address, family’s address, friend’s address etc).
So if you wonder, is a PO Box a residential address, the answer is no.
The reason for that is that you do not live at the location where you have a post office box (you live somewhere else).
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Now, let’s look at a summary of our findings.
Residential Address Meaning
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