My friend has a client that wants to contact ALL businesses in a certain range from an address, no matter if they lie in another ZIP code or not. Can anyone think of a way to find ALL types, sorted by mileage?
One of the companies that sell “all business addresses” might be willing to do the work for you, but it’s not something they would be well equipped for.
Instead, you might have to buy a mailing list of all businesses within the possible ZIP Codes or cities, and get the list as a database that you can manipulate. That might well be the trickiest part, as mailing lists are often sent only to trusted third-party mailing houses so that you don’t rent a list for one-time use and then send stuff out for years.
Once you have the listing of all businesses, anyone with GIS software can geocode the addresses, select those within a buffer around a point, and export the relevant ones.
Buying a mailing list is what we’re trying to get around, I think. Ideally, Yahoo Maps or something would let me limit searches to a distance. The other problem is NOT filtering businesses by type.
Well, you can zoom in on Google Maps and you’ll see business names that you could then write down, look up the address, then try to determine if they’re still in business and whether they actually operate at that address or not. Of course it won’t be all the businesses in the area, just those that Google has magically found in some record, that might offer goods or services to the public, and that will fit on the map, so multistory buildings and offices won’t generally show up.
In some jurisdictions (Florida comes to mind), you could probably FOIA the business licenses for the entire city and then filter them.
Tell the client to buy the mailing list. Mailing lists are relatively cheap – certainly cheaper than trying to build one yourself – not to mention the quality is going to be 900 percent better.
Many (most) municipalities don’t require all businesses to be licensed, therefore don;t have a single registry of businesses. Even if such a thing existed, many of those businesses would have a mailing address that’s different than their physical address. There are dozens of other issues that complicate the task, half of which will never occur to you, and the client will end up missing a sizable number of businesses in the target area and hitting others that are closed, irrelevant, or elsewhere.
If the client doesn’t want to buy the mailing list, maybe the OP’s friend should do it himself and build it into his bill. Trust me… any other solution is going to be frustrating.