Miscellaneous

Comparing free real estate research

By PI Magazine (Tamara Thompson and Rosemarie Mesis)

The free real property databases are extending their geographical coverage and the types of features that delight investigators. Zillow has a fly-on-the-cyber-wall feature that will be appreciated by lawyers and investigators: number of total and recent month page views for a particular property. Find it at the bottom of the “Home Facts” detail page. The last sales date and sales price is available on both Zillow and Cyberhomes, but I found the data more often on Zillow. This site will also show a list of all houses on a specified street, with a link to the home details.

Cyberhomes has a more modern look, but if you’re not especially interested in comparables, Zillow probably offers more for an investigator. Cyberhomes does have an easy to find neighborhood snapshot of census-derived demographic data. The comps and photos, available at both sites, give a quick sense of the neighborhood economic profile.

Free registration at PropertyShark will get you 6 free lookups a day that return property owner name and last sales price. Unfortunately, the county Assessors’ Web sites often don’t provide the owner name, even though it’s a public record. PropertyShark may not have this for all addresses, so you might want to use the free owner lookup at CourthouseDirect.

View your selected slice of real estate on a map at Live, Google, Yahoo, MapQuest or TerraServer at PropertyShark. There’s also a link to the Department of Justice, National Sex Offender Public Web Site.

A few reminders: Not all regions or addresses are included in any of the free sites, which is true for fee-based databases, as well. Some Web sites are missing large geographical areas or addresses on a street. Also, if you’re searching property records as part of an investigation, utilize multiple sources - free and fee-based - and dig into the Assessor and Recorder supplied records. Check their online and onsite records. There are differences.

I wrote about PropertyShark and did another posting, also in 2006, which generated a number of valuable additions in the comments.

How have you used real property sites in investigations?

Full post as published by PI buzz on January 16, 2008 (boomark / email).