Real Estate and Property Tax Information

In our previous article, Gathering your information for a background check or people search, we showed you how to gather some basic information on an individual for a background check or people search. We are going to expand on that information and demonstrate how to find some assets owned by the person and how to view the property tax information for those assets.

From our last article, we discovered how to find a complete name, address, and telephone number for someone, in addition to the county/state they may reside in. The address and city/state/county will be the most important piece of information for the real estate search but the name can also be useful for locating other property that may be owned as well. After a bit of searching, we discovered a web site called tnrealestate.com that allows you to enter a county, address, and owner name.

Entering the information we have already obtained:

County = Lawrence
Address = 509 E Heights Street
Owner = Vernon M. Owens

tells us that there are no exact matches found and returns a ton of results with the most likely match listed first like so:

More often than not, your searches may not turn up what you expected. In this case, ignoring the "For Sale" listings shaded in green, if you look at the very first listing where it says "1-25 of 14275 Matching Tax Data Parcels in Lawrence County" you will notice the address we were searching for is listed but is displayed in a slightly different format than what we entered. (This is something to keep in mind when doing your searches: try as many variations of the data as you can to make sure your not missing something) In fact, if you enter the address as they have it listed: 509 E Heights St, and leave out the owner name you will get only one listing for that property.

There is no doubt that we have found the correct address but there is one problem: the owner name as listed is NOT Vernon M. Owens! The last name is correct but the rest of it is completely different. This Stephen Timothy Owens person could be a husband, son, or other relative. Also note the sale date of 11/17/2005 just after the owners name. Keep in mind that it's possible that this information may be old or not updated that often or an actually sale may have taken place on 11/17/2005. Its also possible that for some reason the property was transferred to or inherited by Stephen Timothy Owens.

Clicking on the address in that listing will reveal a lot of information about the property.

Some of this information may be more useful than others but we can see the square footage is 1352, it was built in 1955 and *apparently* sold on 11/17/2005 for $52000. It also provides details about improvements to the property: front porch, stoop, etc...

Continue: Detailed property search and property tax information