How to Find Records on Your Home
How to Find Records on Your Home
When it comes tax time, there’s all kinds of reasons you’ll want property information. It often seems when you want information fast, you just can’t find what you’re looking to. So if you want to know how to find records on your home when they’ve gone missing, here are a few tips.
Find a Tax Notice
Try to find any kind of tax notice you might have received in the mail. This is a good source of information, because the tax notice should contain your tax identification number and deed number, at the very least.
With this information, finding records on your home should be no problem.
Visit the Tax Assessor’s Office
Go to the tax assessor’s office in the community where you live. Call the city hall and the county courthouse, if you aren’t certain where this is at.
When you get to the tax office, hand the person at the desk your home id number. If you don’t have this handy, the tax officials have the ability to look up your records with just your home address.
The tax assessor keeps a record of tax information in what’s called an Assessment Roll, also known by the slightly ominous sounding “Assessors Roll”.
Look Through the Tax Records
You may be able to search online for these tax records. If not, it’s possible the tax office has a database you can do your research on.
Depending on local policies and how busy they are, you might have to wait for the tax assessor’s staff to find your information, or you might be able to look it up yourself. In either case, you’ll end up paying a fee for any photocopies you make.
Be Sure to Collect All Information
There should be a good amount of documentation on your home, including the year it was built, it’s number of rooms, any improvements that have been made over the years and so on. The tax assessor needs to know all this information, because these things affect the tax rate for homes and properties.
Ask to see the deed to your home, if that’s pertinent in any way to why you’re finding records on your home. Even if it’s just for curiosity, house deeds are public records, so this should be no problem. While the deed you have at the house documents who you bought the house from, the deed information at the tax office should contain who owned the house in the first place.
More Housing Documents
If for some reason you need building permit information, the tax assessors office or some other government building should house that information, too.
In the case that you still don’t have the home records you want, go to the local library and see what kind of property records they keep on your home. People overlook the fact that local libraries have a lot of information on their local town or city.
When you want to know how to find records on your home, you’re going to want plenty of options. You never know when a clerical error misplaces or throws out important housing information at one archive, so you want to have numerous options. Even when you find a document about your home, it’s nice to have a second source, to make sure the information was recorded right in the first place.
That’s what redundancy is all about: to cover for inevitable human error.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 25th, 2010 at 5:20 am and is filed under Address Records, Housing records, Real Estate Records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[...] How to Find Records on Your Home – Discussion of finding records on your current house, to learn about your estimated property value, or any repair issues that might have popped up in the past. Includes the subject of tax notices, tax records databases, the Tax Assessor’s Office, state government archives, and title companies. [...]