How Do Burglars Choose Houses? What the Research Shows

The six factors researchers name

The most careful published summary of burglar target selection we could verify is the problem-oriented policing guide Burglary of Single-Family Houses (Guide No. 18, 2002) by Deborah Lamm Weisel, funded by the US Department of Justice COPS Office. The publisher dates it to 2002 and the crime figures it works from run through 1999, so read it as a durable synthesis of older research rather than a current measurement. It synthesizes offender interviews and victimization research into six factors:

• Familiarity with the target and convenience of the location
• Occupancy
• Visibility, meaning how easily neighbors or passersby can see the house
• Accessibility
• Vulnerability or security
• Potential rewards

The ordering matters more than the list. The guide states plainly that visibility and accessibility are more important than vulnerability or security, which a burglar typically cannot assess from afar unless the resident has left the house visibly open. In other words, the features you can buy are usually invisible at the moment of selection, while the features of your lot and street are not.

Familiarity is the quiet one. Offenders tend to commit crimes relatively close to where they live, and burglars often target houses on routes between home and work or on other routine travel paths. Older, more professional burglars travel farther. The guide also notes that burglars often know their victims at least loosely, as neighborhood residents, casual acquaintances, or people they provided a service to, which means they may already know a household routine.

Occupancy and concealment do most of the work

Occupancy is the factor with the strongest support among the six. Most burglars do not target occupied houses and take considerable care to avoid them, and some studies find burglars routinely ring doorbells to confirm nobody is home. How long residents are away from home is a strong predictor of burglary risk, which is why single-person, single-parent, and younger-occupant households show higher vulnerability in this research.

From the same guide, the houses at higher risk on occupancy grounds are:

• Houses vacant for extended periods, including vacation and weekend homes, and homes whose residents are away, especially where open garage doors or accumulated mail signal the absence
• Houses routinely vacant during the day, since houses that appear occupied (lights on, a vehicle in the driveway, visible activity, audible noise) are less likely to be burglarized
• Houses of new residents, since higher-mobility neighborhoods tend to have higher burglary rates
• Houses without dogs, since a dog is a close substitute for human occupancy and burglarized houses are on average less likely to have dogs than non-burglarized houses

Concealment is the second half. The guide identifies trees and dense shrubs near doors and windows, privacy walls and fences, latticed porches and projecting garages as cover, and reports that entrances hidden by solid fencing or mature vegetation are the entry point in the majority of burglaries of single-family houses. Secluded houses, set back from the road or beside parks and other nonresidential land, reduce the chance a burglar is seen or heard. Corner houses are more vulnerable because occupancy is easier to assess and there are fewer immediate neighbors. Houses near major thoroughfares, on the outskirts of neighborhoods, or next to alleys are exposed for the same underlying reason: more strangers passing, fewer residents who would notice one.

Accessibility comes down to entry points. Side and back doors and windows are the most common access route, though in some areas the front door dominates, which the guide attributes to architectural differences. In the data the 2002 guide summarizes, which runs through the late 1990s, about two-thirds of reported US burglaries (including commercial ones) involved forced entry, typically with simple tools such as screwdrivers or crowbars, or by breaking a window or kicking a door. In about one-third, no force was used at all: the offender walks in through an unlocked or open window or door, often a basement window or a garage door. Two decades later the FBI's 2019 legacy reporting put the forcible-entry share lower, at 55.7 percent of burglaries, with 37.8 percent unlawful entry and 6.5 percent attempted forcible entry. The two figures are not in conflict; they are different years and slightly different bases. Treat forced entry as somewhere between roughly half and two-thirds of burglaries depending on which year and dataset you take, and note that a large minority involve no force at all in every version of the data.

Reward cues, and what burglars themselves say

On reward, burglars read the size and condition of a house and the cars in the driveway as proxies for what is inside. Large, well-maintained houses with expensive vehicles are at elevated risk. But the guide adds a wrinkle that gets left out of most repetitions of this finding: burglars avoid the most expensive houses, presumably assuming they carry more security or are more likely to be occupied. Prosperity attracts up to a point, then repels.

Once inside, the guide reports burglars are most likely to take cash and goods that are easy to carry and sell: jewelry, weapons, televisions, audio equipment, and computers.

A second evidence stream is asking burglars directly. The best-known US example is a 2012 survey of 422 incarcerated burglars run by researchers at UNC Charlotte, which asked how offenders selected targets and what deterred them. We go through that study, its findings on alarms and signs, and its real limitations in do security signs deter burglars, and we do not repeat its numbers here.

What matters for this question is how much weight offender interviews can carry. Since police clear so few burglaries, there are likely major differences between successful burglars and the ones who get arrested, and every interview study samples the second group. Offenders' willingness or ability to recall burglaries accurately also shapes the findings. Read target-selection lists as informed patterns, not as a rulebook the next burglar is following.

One more finding worth naming: previously burglarized houses face a much higher risk than houses never burglarized, up to four times higher, partly because the features that made them vulnerable once (location, occupancy pattern) are hard to change.

Turning the research into a short list

Nothing in this evidence rewards spending first. It rewards removing the cues that put your house on a short list.

• Look at your house from the street and from the alley or back fence, and ask what a stranger could approach without being seen. Cover near doors and windows is the single most repeated finding.
• Treat vacancy as the risk it is. Interior lights on timers, a vehicle in the driveway, mail and packages collected, and no visible pile-up while you travel.
• Secure side and back entries first, since that is where entry most often happens, and remember that a third of burglaries involve no force at all, so an unlocked window undoes a good deadbolt.
• Do not read a security purchase as a selection deterrent. Most systems are invisible from the street, which is exactly why the research puts visibility and accessibility above security in target selection.

What measurably lowers burglary risk, and what the deterrence evidence does and does not support, is covered in do security signs deter burglars. Apartment and rental setups have a different weak-point list, in the apartment door security checklist and home security for renters.