You do NOT need a location for customers to visit. If you did that would make a great deal of service based businesses ineligible.
You do need to provide your address to be sent a verification code but don't have to display it.
I have attached a screenshot from their FAQ's to assist.
if u want to show on google maps and the map pack you do need premises that customers can visit or they will remove you from the map ... personally happened to me last week
I was only trying to help the guy by providing him with the relevant info.
But if you insist on trying to be clever I would say the following:
I didn't say anything about Maps - the original post refers to BUSINESS LISTING - not maps.
And I was correctly making the point that a business does not need a physical location to be eligible for a BUSINESS LISTING.
And you clearly don't understand the eligibility guidelines. It's not "serve customers at their location" as in their meaning the business. It's having a physical shop front OR travel to visit customers where THEY are,i.e. where the customer is = a service provider.
But on the subject of maps again you don't need a location for customers to visit to appear. If you did how on earth would service providers appear? And that personally happens to me every week because I'm on maps and don't have a location to visit.
As for the suggestion of intentionally falsely representing how your business operates and lie by saying customers come to you when they don't....yeah terrific idea that if you want to get thrown off GMB completely.
Not only is it unnecessary as explained above, it's also only a matter of time before they realise. Assuming the main business category is 'Cleaning Service' or 'Window Cleaners' how long do you think it will take them to work out he may just be telling them porkies? Unless of course they think customers take their windows to him.
Or registering from scratch? Yes that's fine if he changes the company name,domain name and where he lives (assuming he wants listing verified). Otherwise they will already have all the current information about him and his company,and again,may just possibly notice he's not being completely honest and trying to have them over.
They also use other information/website/directory listings across the web - not just what you tell them.
There is no purge going on of businesses without a shop front. That would totally defeat the whole point of GMB and not only wipe out a good deal of its listings,it would render the whole thing pretty useless. It would also automatically make Bing,Yelp (in US particularly),Yell etc the go-to places for ALL business info. That is the last thing Google wants to do. It wants to be the pre-eminent search engine for everything.
Finally,getting thrown off GMB has implications for ranking in local search. The algorithms used in producing local search results use your Google My Business listing , among other things , for 'relevancy signals' relative to the search term entered. No GMB listing can only have a detrimental effect and is likely to result in a lower ranking.