The message comes in at nine at night. Someone saw the listing, they’re only in town until Thursday, could they see the place tomorrow at two. They sign off with a first name.
At two o’clock you will be alone, in an empty house, with a person you know one thing about.
This is the part of showing a property that nobody puts in the training material. It isn’t about whether they’d make a good tenant or a good buyer — that decision comes later and has its own rules. It’s about the hour you’re going to spend in a building with no neighbours, no furniture and no witnesses.
One name is not information
A first name and a phone number feel like enough because they arrived together. They aren’t. Anyone can send that message, and the people you’d most want to know about are exactly the ones who’ll keep it short.
The fix isn’t dramatic. Before you confirm the time, ask for a full name and reply to them at the number they messaged from. That’s already two things to compare. If they’ll give you an email, that’s three.
Then see whether those three agree with each other.
What agreement looks like
A real person leaves a trail that hangs together. The phone number has been theirs for a while. The name attached to it is the name they gave you. There’s an address history that makes sense, an email that predates last week, some presence somewhere online that isn’t blank.
Nothing here has to be perfect. People change numbers, come off social media, move house twice in a year. What you’re looking for is contradiction, not perfection.
The number registered to a different name for the last five years. The email created nine days ago. The insistence on a viewing time when nobody else will be around, from someone who won’t put a surname in writing. Individually, all explainable. Together, a reason to move the appointment to a time when your colleague can come.
Do the same thing for everyone
It’s tempting to only run a check when something feels off. Don’t. Two reasons.
The first is that your instincts are worse than you think and they carry assumptions you didn’t choose. Screening the people who seem unfamiliar and waving through the ones who seem familiar is a bias, not a filter, and it’ll miss the polite ones.
The second is that a rule applied to everybody stops being awkward. “I confirm identity before every viewing” is a sentence anyone can say without apologising. “I wanted to check up on you specifically” is not.
TellData is built for identity checks, not for employment, tenancy or credit decisions — those need an FCRA-compliant screening service.
Two minutes before you leave the office
You can piece this together yourself. Reverse-lookup the number, search the name, see what surfaces. On one viewing that’s fine. On six a week it stops happening, which is the real problem with manual checks — they don’t fail, they just quietly stop.
A single report puts identity and SSN trace, address history, court and criminal records, watchlist screening and phone and email consistency in one place, and returns Clear, Review or Flag. It takes about two minutes and you can read it in the car. Here’s what’s inside one.
The point isn’t more data. It’s that a mismatch is obvious when the details sit side by side and invisible when they’re in four different browser tabs.
Two o’clock
Most of the time the person at the door is exactly who they said they were, running late, apologetic, and genuinely house-hunting.
The check costs you two minutes and you’ll never know which of the viewings it mattered for. That’s rather the point of it.