These articles from the Background Records Blog should help you conduct research on real estate records. Whether you are buying a home or need to learn about the history of your own home, you may one day need to conduct a search of property records. These articles provide useful tips and links to resources you can use.
Real Estate Contract 101
Real estate contracts are a significant part of the property records you’ll be searching, so I wanted to talk about real estate contracts today. Whenever you buy or sell homes or land property, you’ll be signing a real estate contract of some sort. If you rent or lease real estate of any kind, you’ll be signing some kind of real estate agreement.
Since these contracts involve a whole lot of money and commitment, you need to know what your rights and obligations are, when signing these documents. Remember, verbal agreements are well and nice and tend to happen first when property changes hands, but handshakes deals don’t protect you in court. So let’s delve into what real estate contracts are all about.
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County Property Records
I wrote recently about looking up county real estate records in a general article about real estate documents and online research. But I’ve never gone through an example of how to look up county real estate records, or exactly what information can be accessed through each office.
So I wanted to go over the particulars of which official sites are best for certain online research into property records. Since Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the nation, I decided to use L.A. County as our example. You’ll easily find these websites in a Google search, and the county sites for Los Angeles are among the best and most informative of their kind online.
Read County Real Estate Records …
Find Property Land Owners Online
You don’t need to know much about property or “private eye work” to learn how to find a property land owner. There are five simple steps to getting the information you need about who owns a piece of property. Getting the information you need might be as simple as finding your county’s online property information and doing a free search, or it could cost you a few bucks through a real estate information search service. Start at the top and work your way down, and you’ll find a property’s land owner in no time.
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Find Records About Your Own 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.
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Find Property Records Online
People in real estate or the civil law field need to know how to look up property records. Anyone can do a property lookup, because housing records fall under the public domain.
Even if you are a lawyer or a real estate broker, it might be important to you to know who owns and has owned a house or piece of land. This might include a prospective buyer, a tax official or a city planner.
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Find House and Land Records
Property records can establish not only who owns a house or piece of land, but who owned properties in the past and who has payed property taxes all along. To look up property records of various kinds, you might need to search county tax assessor property records to see some information, while looking at city property records to establish ownership.
Luckily, it’s easier to find a property or land owner now than it ever has been before, thanks to the convenicance of the Internet. Generally speaking, you’re going to be able to find free property records online, though occasionally, you might have to pay a one-time subscription to browse a database of state property records or county property records (no recommendations here as to which website’s are best).
The actual public records are usually best, though, and most cities, counties and states have their own free access sites these days. If you have to pay money to browse, it’s usually going to be at a brick-and-mortar public records archive, where you might pay money to copy records or pay a fee to compensate the corresponding government for the official whose time you are spending.
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