How Burglars Choose Houses: A Walkthrough of Target Selection

Popular culture pictures burglars studying blueprints. The research describes something faster and more mundane: a scout moves through an area — on foot, by car, sometimes while doing legitimate work — and filters. Most houses are discarded in seconds for reading as risky. The one that gets approached is simply the one left over after everything else was crossed off.

Two sources dominate what we actually know. The first is a 2013 academic survey by Kuhns and colleagues at UNC Charlotte, who asked 422 incarcerated burglars how they chose targets; it was funded by AIREF, an alarm-industry research foundation, which is worth knowing when you weigh its findings. The second is a 2017 KGW-TV project in which journalist Kyle Iboshi put similar questions to 86 Oregon inmates — journalism rather than peer-reviewed research. Their agreement with each other is the best credibility signal either one offers.

When the UNC Charlotte respondents described what pushed them toward or away from a target, the same factors kept surfacing at the top of the list:

Alarms deserve their own line. About 83% of the UNC Charlotte respondents said they would try to determine whether an alarm was present before attempting a burglary, and roughly 60% said they would seek another target if one was. More than half said that discovering an alarm mid-burglary would make them abandon the job. These are self-reports from an industry-funded survey — but no competing data set contradicts them, and they align with what the Oregon inmates said independently.

The KGW inmates described a strikingly uniform ritual: essentially all of them said they would knock on the door or ring the bell before doing anything else. Not out of politeness — to test occupancy. A house that answers, in any form, fails the test and gets skipped.

Their strongest stay-away signals were all occupancy proxies: a car in the driveway, sound inside the house — a TV, a radio, footsteps — and a big, loud dog. Their most common entry method involved neither lockpicks nor broken glass; most said they came in through doors and windows that were simply unlocked.

The probing exists because guessing wrong is genuinely dangerous for them. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that a household member was present during roughly 28% of burglaries. That risk is exactly why occupancy checks are so aggressive — and why signals of presence carry more weight than any lock.

Escape-route thinking explains preferences that otherwise look random. Corner lots offer two directions of exit. Alley access provides a screened approach and a screened retreat. Deep setbacks, tall privacy fencing, and overgrown foundation plantings all cut both ways: they screen your home from the street, and they screen an intruder from every neighbor. What reads as privacy to you reads as concealment to a scout.

You cannot move your lot, but you can change what it shows. Trimming growth that blocks sightlines to entry points, lighting the routes a person would actually use, and keeping side gates locked converts geometry a scout likes into geometry that exposes them. And daylight matters as much as darkness: FBI data for 2024 counted 216,601 daytime residential burglaries against 174,053 at night, because burglars follow occupancy — and houses empty out during work hours.

The evidence on visible security is positive but nuanced. The KGW respondents described outdoor cameras as a deterrent — though some read them the opposite way, as a hint that something inside was worth protecting. Alarm signs and stickers appear in the UNC Charlotte deterrent list, with the obvious caveat that a signal which costs nothing is also easy to fake, and experienced offenders know it.

It is also worth saying plainly what the research cannot support. Most of the dramatic percentages that circulate online about homes with and without security have no locatable primary source, and we do not repeat them. The honest picture is narrower: burglars say they check for alarms, most say an alarm would push them elsewhere, occupancy signals dominate everything, and the national burglary rate sits at a record low of 229.2 per 100,000 (FBI, 2024), with roughly 52% of burglaries hitting residences.

Put the two surveys together and one conclusion stands out: target selection is finished before anything illegal happens. The knock, the slow drive-by, the glance down the side yard — that is the decision point. Whatever your property communicates during those minutes is the only case it gets to make.

This reframes what deterrence means. A system that reacts only at the moment of entry is arguing after the verdict. The properties that come off the list early are the ones that answer the probe: a door that responds when knocked, light that arrives at the right moment, evidence of active attention rather than passive recording. The research says most scouts who conclude they are being watched apply the simplest rule in their playbook — find an easier one.

If you searched how burglars choose houses while shopping for a home security system, one distinction is worth understanding: nearly everything in that category — cameras, alarm panels, monitored sensors — watches, records, and notifies. An Automatic Property Defense System like PerimeterEye is built for the reconnaissance window instead: it acts on the property itself, in seconds, automatically, while you watch live.

The escalation maps almost one-to-one onto the signals in these surveys. The system verifies that an unknown person is on the property — it knows the household, so family arrivals and mail carriers never trigger deterrence. Then a motorized searchlight locks onto the person and physically follows them, the way a police helicopter's beam holds a subject. Then a live AI voice addresses them specifically, describing the actual person in frame — the strongest possible answer to the occupancy question every burglar asks first. If they stay, a 130 dB siren fires and you get priority alerts with live video, with the option to speak yourself or take manual control at any point.

That is the burglar's own checklist run in reverse: people present, property watched, alarm confirmed. No security system can guarantee prevention of every incident, but the research is unambiguous about which signals make a scout move on — and a property that produces all of them during reconnaissance takes itself off the list at the only moment the list is being written.