Length of Residency

Years ago many direct mailers, especially insurance companies, would use LOR (length of residency) as a critical element in their mailing list selection criteria.

Statistics prove that the longer a person has lived in their house, the older they are. And for most mail-order insurance offers, age is critical.

Today we have many other ways to determine age, and we rarely think about LOR.

However … LOR served another purpose. Studies show that the longer a person has lived in their house (and the longer they have worked at the same job), the more stable they are. That translates to a much better credit risk. Stability is critical when determining whether or not to grant someone credit.
I thought it would be interesting to explore LOR and to provide you with some real figures. I’ve chosen California households for this example, because it’s a highly mobile society and more likely to have shorter LORs.

As you can see, only 35% of the households made their last move prior to 2000. These are your most stable households.

So forget using LOR to determine the age of the household members, we have better tools for that today. But if you’re selling on credit this is certainly something you want to add to your selection “mix”. Remember the longer the LOR, the more stable, the better the credit risk.