Courthouse Research
In almost all cases you are going to want to go to the assessor’s office. Before you leave to go there, you wan tot check on the internet and see if the assessor has a web site that allows you to look up information on properties. More and more counties and cities now have such sites – it is a lot more comfortable to do the work at home.
We will assume that you were unlucky and have to go to the courthouse.
Call first and find out where the land records are located and what hours they are available. Depending on what the taxing authority included on the published list, this may be the first of two or three trips. If you don’t have all the information we want our list, our first task is to get the missing information.
Usually you will want to go to the assessor’s office, and today most assessors have a computer system with a public terminal or several public terminals. Spend a little time talking with one of the people at the counter to what you are looking for and ask how to use the terminal. In 99 cases out of 100 I have found the people very willing to help me.
What other information do we want?
We want all the information on our list above and we would like to get as many of the items listed below as possible. Some taxing authorities won’t have any of and others will have all of it.
- Last sale price: If possible we would like to know how much the property sold for the last time it sold.
- Last sale date: The information above will have less meaning if the property last sold in 1943.
- Mortgage holder: Is there a mortgage on the property? If so, who has it and what is their address (if you buy the lien you are going to need this information). Remember that mortgage companies will want to redeem the property.
- Mortgage amount: Another possible indication of value and what the mortgage company’s exposure is
- other liens on the property: See if you can find out if there are other liens on the property, there could be IRS liens, mechanics liens, second or third mortgages.
The following will tell us more about the property:
- Square footage of structure
- type of construction
- Year it was built
- number of bedrooms
10. Number of bathrooms
11. Lot size
12. Any other information you find
After the courthouse
When you get back from the courthouse you want to update your list, adding all the information you now have. You now do a final review and determine if any of the properties on the list do not meet your criteria. Eliminate those and copy your spreadsheet to your final drive by inspection list.
This list should have about 10-20 times as many properties on it as you could buy – you aren’t going to get all the properties you want.