How to Check for Sex Offenders Near a Home You're Buying

Of all the questions a home buyer wants answered, this is the one their agent is least able to discuss. Fair Housing law bars agents from steering buyers toward or away from neighborhoods based on who lives there, so most agents will deflect the question entirely. What they can do — and what federal guidance now points to — is hand you sourced third-party data and let you read it yourself. The good news: the underlying records are public, free, and searchable by address in every state. You just have to know where to look and how to read what you find.

The official sources (skip the scare sites)

Every state maintains a public registry. In Florida it is the FDLE Sexual Offenders and Predators database; in Maryland, the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS) Sex Offender Registry. The federal National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW) searches across state registries at once. Search by the specific address with a radius — a quarter mile, a half mile, a mile — not just by ZIP code, and repeat the search for any school or park on the daily route your family would actually use.

Third-party sites repackage this same data under alarming headlines. Go to the source instead: the state registry is the record, it is free, and it shows the registrant's address, offense category, and registration status as the state holds them.

Read ratios, not raw fear

A raw count means little without a baseline. Registrants live in every ZIP code in America; the useful question is whether an area's density is higher or lower than its surroundings. Three real ZIP codes from our sample reports show the spread:

• ZIP 33415 (West Palm Beach, FL): 53 registrants — 1 per 956 residents. That is a higher density than Palm Beach County overall, at 1 per 1,180.
• ZIP 33405 (West Palm Beach, FL): 13 registrants — about 1 per 1,700 residents, lower than the county baseline.
• ZIP 21409 (Annapolis, MD): 1 per 2,961 residents — while the City of Annapolis proper, a few miles away, sat at 1 per 660. Same metro, wildly different densities, and the ZIP-level number is the one that describes the streets you would actually live on.

Sources: City-Data registry compilations from FDLE data (ZIP 33415 as of November 1, 2026; ZIP 33405 as of August 10, 2026) and Maryland DPSCS data (ZIP 21409 and Annapolis), retrieved November 2026.

What the registry can and cannot tell you

Read the record with clear eyes about its limits:

• It is a snapshot. People move; registrations update on a lag. Run the check when you first look, and again a few days before closing.
• Density is not danger math. A registrant count says nothing by itself about overall crime — read it alongside the ZIP's actual crime rates, not instead of them.
• Proximity beats totals. One registrant on your street matters differently than fifty across a wide ZIP. The radius search around the specific address is the number that counts.
• Absence is not a guarantee. Registries cover registered offenders who comply. Treat a clean result as one input, not an all-clear.

Why your agent hands you a report instead of an opinion

HUD's April 24, 2026 guidance to the real estate industry addressed exactly this gap: rather than agents offering personal impressions about an area's safety or population — impressions that invite Fair Housing violations — the safe and useful pattern is sharing sourced, third-party data, presented the same way for every client, with the source shown. That is the standard a CurbFacts report is built to: the registry count near your address, the ZIP ratio, the county baseline, and the official registry named as the source, so you can verify it yourself in two minutes.

Your 10-minute version

• Search the state registry (FDLE in Florida, DPSCS in Maryland) by the home's exact address, at a half-mile and one-mile radius.
• Cross-check on NSOPW to catch neighboring-state registrations near borders.
• Get the baseline. Compare the ZIP's residents-per-registrant ratio to the county's; higher or lower than baseline is the real signal.
• Check the route, not just the home — the assigned school, the bus stop, the park.
• Re-run it before closing. Registries change; your decision should rest on the freshest pull.

This check costs nothing and takes minutes — the only reason most buyers skip it is that nobody at the showing is allowed to raise it. Run it yourself, from the official source, for every address on your list.