Question about public tax records

In most areas you will need to go to the courthouse or access their office data on-line. The most useful info will come from the Assessor's office. The assessor determines the market value of properties. They have guidelines set out by their state on determining that value. Please note, assessors don't determine mareket value the same way we, as investors, do so you can not use their figures as FMV in your valuation. Their records do include lot size, square footage of the building, bedrooms and baths and general construction type. You should also be able to get owner name and mailing address. If the assessor doesn't have that info, use the APN (Assessors Parcel Number)and go to the collector's office to get current the mailing address.

A local title company might be able to help you too!! You might try contacting them. You will need to develop a rapport and dangle a carrot for them to possibly offer thes services for free otherwise they might request a fee for the searches. They have access to a variety of different court house information and might be able to do a search for absentee owners or buyers at the last forclosure or tax auction etc. They have a system that they can use to filter through the information and give you more results and details specific to what you might be looking for!!

the carrot by the way might be that you will bring your closings to them and refer others to their office!!!

Is there a website you can go to for this? Or a software that will pull this info from there courthouse

A good general search site is www.netronline.com From their main page, select "Public Records Online". The next page you see will be a map of the U.S.. Select your state by clicking on the map or the postal abbreviations at the bottom of the page. You will then see a drop-down menu of the counties. Select the county of your choice. It will say one of three things. "No information available online", "Website only" or "Data available online". The best is the data online. Website only just gives you info on the office, hour, phone numbers, etc. Even access to the on-line data varies from county to county. Some make part or all of it available for free, others charge a subscription fee to access the info.

Such great information! Thank you for sharing. As a newbie I didn't know half of this stuff and I think it's so necessary to find buyers and leads. Thanks again.

This helped me out alot i'm looking at a few properties at the moment and i'm trying to figure out a few things myself as i do the research.