I just read a report on Realtor.org which disturbed me greatly. The report suggest that agents provide clients with information from the sex offender registry. Some of you may know that I was a police officer for 4 years before I got into real estate. Now this doesn't make me an expert, but it does give me a little better perspective on some things.
First I want to tell you that the sex offender registry is not a complete list. Just because an area doesn't have any sex offenders registered there doesn't mean that there isn't an offender that has failed to register or one that hasn't been caught yet living right down the road. So I think it gives people comfort where there should not be any. It is a useful tool, but should not be used as an indicator of anything.
Secondly and most importantly, if you look at this list you are opening yourself to a huge liability in my opinion. If you learn that a sex offender lives on a certain street then, in my opinion, you should be disclosing this fact to every client you show a house to in this neighborhood forever (or at least until you recheck and can see that the person is no longer living there and there are no new sex offenders). I know this sounds like a head-in-the-sand type approach, but I don't know any other way around the huge liability this information presents. We have a duty to let our clients know about neighborhood concerns and this is certainly one of them. I'm not one two run from risk either, I blatantly tell people if the schools in an area are horrible (followed by statistical data that supports my opinion). I think you will agree that there is a big difference between a child having a bad year at a school and being sexually assaulted. If you're not prepared to share the information (good or bad) with everyone of your clients, then you shouldn't look it up.
If you have a client that is especially concerned about this issue than they are probably already aware of the site, but I don't see a problem with you giving them the address if they aren't. However I would make sure you explain to them that it is an incomplete list and there are sex offenders everywhere, some registered and some not.
Of course this is just my opinion, if anyone else out there disagrees or has a better solution I would like to here it.
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