The people next door. Why it's important to know your neighbors

It may sound paranoid or exaggerated to want to perform a background check on your neighbors, but with all that’s going on in the world today, you never know who the man next door is. It is better to be safe than sorry and reduce your chances of moving in next to a sex offender, thief or even criminal.

Doing some research on your neighbors is a wise thing do to, regardless if you’ve just moved in to a new place, someone new has just moved in, you have some suspicions related to someone or you simply want to know more about the people living next to you.

A simple greeting and chit chat is never enough to figure out who a person is.

Why is it important to find out who your neighbors are? Well, there are plenty of reasons: this can help you protect your children, your property and even your pets (who doesn’t have that one neighbor who hates animals and is willing to do anything to get rid of them? Those kind of people will even resort to poisoning your pets).

Another reason to do some digging on your neighbors is to find out if they are sex offenders. 

Here are some signals you should pay attention to, when it comes to your neighbors:

• Your neighbors seem to know a lot about you and what’s going on in your home
• They are really introverted and withdrawn
• Too much noise, music played out loud, coming from your neighbors. Sometimes, that noise is not just disturbing, but a signal that they’re trying to cover something up
• There’s a lot of traffic around their house, on a daily basis. People are constantly coming in and out. That might indicate that they’re involved in activities like drug dealing, for example
• They have an abnormal number of dogs, especially fighting dog breeds. This might indicate they’re involved in dog fights
• Your neighbor offers to sell you something for an unusually low price. They might try to sell a stolen good, to get rid of it as quickly as possible
• They have a lot of things in their house, storage, garage, that look in mint condition and unused. This might also indicate stolen property.

There are other obvious signals that we are not going to insist upon, such as screams coming from their house, a lot of fighting, gunshots and so on.

Regardless of your reasons, performing a background check on them is a useful thing to do and allows you to extract important information that will help you know them better. A background check can reveal if they have a weapon permit, a criminal record, tax liens, bankruptcies and more.

You can perform a background check by their name, their phone number, email address, etc.  

Even if you don’t want to use a specialized background check service, you can still do some research and look at public records or their social media profiles.

Last, but not least, you should learn how to stay safe and follow some useful tips that will help you in any scenario:

• don’t brag around about going on vacations
• never keep your spare key outside
• make sure you have solid locks, doors and windows
• invest in a security system