Are condo addresses mailing addresses? I have an address that is:
Street Name Condo#
City, State
If I mail a letter there, will it arrive?
More generally, are physical addresses always mailing addresses? I have some friends who live in a town where there are no mailboxes – everybody gets mail at the post office. If I send mail to their street address, would it still get to them? Is this always the case?
Is there no building number to go with the street name? Otherwise, there’s no difference between sending to any other apartment.
As for people who don’t have home delivery, you are supposed to send it to the PO Box number. But given that these tend to be pretty small towns, chances are the local mail sorter will know who it’s for and toss it in the right box if you use their physical address.
Right – no building number. It just looks like an apartment address (which is what I’d assume it was if I didn’t already know it was a condo). I guess I’ll sent it off. Thanks.
Ah, I didn’t realize it was predominantly small towns. Having always lived in the country, I just assumed the bigger the city got, the less likely you’d get mail to your house.
If you want to confirm that the postal service recognizes the address, you can enter it here and you’ll get the official USPS version. (Canada Post has a similar service on their Web site.)
Actually, towns/population centers above a certain size (2500? I can’t find the cite now on the USPS site) have letter carriers just like people in the country do. So a town which does not is pretty small. For example, the town I grew up in had about 1000 people, and no mail delivery. We had people (usually relatives) who addressed letters to our house instead of our PO Box occasionally, and we always got it. I think a letter with just our last name and town would have made it.
It was more amazing when UPS once delivered a package addressed to our PO Box straight to our house!
All winter, the UPS drivers delivered packages to my workplace instead of chancing the snowy driveway, no matter what address was on it. It actually got a little annoying - even on sunny days, they’d bail and we wouldn’t get our package for an extra day or so. One driver delivered my new laptop to the tiny post office we use (while I waited for it anxiously at home). Thankfully, the postmaster put it in one of the lockboxes and the driver called me at home to tell me. The FedEx Ground lady is even worse - she’s always calling my husband’s cell and asking him to meet her to pick it up because she doesn’t want to drive the extra 10 miles. I mean, sometimes that’s okay, but isn’t it their job to Deliver Packages?
I always add my PO Box # to the same address line as my physical address when ordering because you never know how companies will ship. And they still drop the box # sometimes. The PO is inconsistent about dealing with these mistakes. I’ve currently got a package in PO limbo-land b/c of a dropped box #.
Oh well, it’s still nice having a post office the size of a postage stamp where the postmaster calls you if you get an express envelope.
My parents don’t have home delivery, and they never give out their P.O. Box Number–only their street address. In fact, I don’t even know what the box number is. I don’t recall their ever having a problem receiving mail, and I’d assume it would be much the same in any town small enough to lack a mail carrier…
I assume we’re talking about US addresses here. For my work we occasionally have to deal with understanding and parsing worldwide addressing schemes for computer applications. In our office we have a book that describes the details of the addressing scheme of each country. It’s as big as a large college textbook.
Ed
I have a similar need. Could you please post some details about your book so I could locate a copy??
Some condos do use their name as the street address. Right down the block from my office is “Coriander Way.” Usually the address is given as 79 Coriander Way, 79 being the unit number. If you address it as “Coriander Way; Unit 79” I’m sure it would get there.
The town of Alpine New Jersey has no street numbers, just names. But the lot sizes are so big and the street sizes so short there’s only 3 to 10 houses on each street. And most of the owners use post office boxes.
Oy. One of my hats is to assign physical addresses to properties for a small 25,000 pop or so county. 99% of the folks here get their mail at a PO box.
Street Name Condo#
City, State
If you mean
Main St #123
Anywhere, Some state
That won’t get it to the condo. 123 would be the Condo Unit number. At least where I live, a multi-unit structure has a building street address, and then a unit number.
Physical addresses are 99.9 percent of the time mailing addresses. ‘cept for the very few places in the USA that don’t have any delivery system. Like where I live. The post office does not deliver here. And frankly, I don’t want them to. It’s pointless.
It really depends on if the town you mail it too has a Postal delivery system. I go through this a lot. Try to do a re-fi and not let them mail you something to something other than a PO box. “Send it to POB….” “No, we must send it to your house” “You can’t” “Why not?” “I don’t get mail delivered to my house” “Heh?” and on and on……
I could right volumes about this. But think about it. The county tax assessor needs to send the tax bill to second home owners. Homes that are vacant 99% of the time. So to answer your question, Mailing and physical addresses are not necessarily the same.
I work for County Gov that does not get postal delivery. Well about 99% of us don’t. I’m GIS (geographic information systems)
I never try to have something shipped to my house. I can’t imagine a UPS/FedX truck trying to get up our road, and I don’t want the guy to have to hike up our drive. I have it sent to work.
I have just been tasked with developing an online reporting system for ‘bad-wrong’ physical addresses for our county.
I am not looking forward to it.
WOW. The USPS took something in for you from UPS? That’s pretty damn good service, and I suspect against all their rules.
Good for them.
It’ll have to wait till the next work week when I go back to the office. And then I’ll have to look around for it, we haven’t needed it for a whille. . .
I do remember it was very expensive as it had only extremely specialized uses.
Ed
If the USPS delivers mail there and doesn’t tell you to fix the address, it’s a mailing address. You can ask your local post office.
My apartment has the same form of address. The apartment complex main office is on that street, and so are some of the buildings, but mine is closer to another street!
The complex has been here for a while, so the USPS gets mail to it no problem. UPS is a different story. The apt complex won’t accept UPS packages, and UPS sometimes leaves packages outside my door or (even worse) tosses them onto the patio without telling me! Or, they require a signature which forces me to run to the nearest shipping office.
For that reason, I use a separate mailing and shipping address. Most internet vendors allow that. I ship everything to my office! They don’t mind at all, and someone is usually around to sign. If not, I just e-mail the shipping dept. and they run it over to me. Sweet!
The mailing address of the condo I’m renting is 411 Streetname Place. Streetname is actually one of several short streets that come off from the main street of the condo complex, and only has two buildings on it. All of the buildings in the complex, regardless of what street they are physically located on, are numbered in order from one end of the complex to the other. My building is the fourth one from the beginning, and the last two digits of the address indicate where in the building the unit is located; in my case, unit one on the first floor.
When I applied for my state ID card after I moved here the DMV entered the address into the computer, which promptly added “Building 400” to it, although I’ve never seen it used by anyone else. However, recently signs were put up in front of each building identifying it as “Building XX00, Units XX11-XX34”.
Sorry it took so long. Here it is:
“Global Sourcebook of Address Data Management”
by Graham Rhind
published by Gower
As I said, it is expensive.
I live in a rural area, and don’t have delivery. I have a PO box in a different town, as it’s on my way home. The post office charges me if packages are delivered to them addressed to me at my home address, and with on-line ordering I often don’t know what carrier will deliver a package. The post office said I can get around it by giving my address as:
Me
1234 my street Box 5678
Town in which I have PO Box, VT
It’s worked so far, but probably wouldn’t if my street didn’t begin in the town in which I have a PO Box.