The Royal Mail PAF contains over 31 million ‘front door’ letterbox addresses in the UK. But behind around 182,000 of those front doors are 733,000 residences or organisational units which do not appear on PAF. This is because those additional addresses do not each have their own Royal Mail accessible letterbox. Now, these extra addresses are available from AFD Software.

Student accommodation, apartments and business premises are all present on the Multiple Residence file. The number of separate addresses behind the single accessible letterbox can be as few as one additional record – or as many as 1,000!

This situation can have serious consequences in many sectors including retail, financial, insurance and distribution. For example, if you capture an address as 30 Park Place, LS1 2SP, you would not be aware that this building containing 63 residences only has one address on PAF. It’s easy to see how fraud can occur. A courier delivers a TV signed for by a person who opens the front door – and the intended recipient denies receiving it. A credit card is delivered with the sender not realising that this is a ‘high risk’ property.

• There are 182,000 ‘parent’ addresses on PAF behind which are 733,000 ‘child’ addresses.
• 82% of the parent records have 1-4 child addresses 17% of parent records have 5-17 child addresses
• 261 parent records have 100 or more child addresses, of these:
• 4 have more than 1000
• 41 have more than 500
• 95 have more than 250