How To Find Existing Mortgages On A Property?
 

Guys, I have a quick question. Given the street address of a house, what is the cheapest and fastest way to determine what mortgages are on it? Without asking the owner.

County Recorder's office will have all recorded mortgages. Public record. Some counties have everything on-line, some don't.

With only the street address you likely will have to go to the tax assessors office to ascertain the owners name and legal description. With that info you can go to property records office and search mortgages and deeds of trust . Which will be indexed by owner's name but you need legal description to confirm a mortgage is recorded on the property in question based on the legal description,

Or you could pay a freelance real estate paralegal $100 or so to do it.

Give me the county/stae in question and I'll see if info is available online.

I don't think you can find current mortgage balances though. You can usually do the math and ballpark it.

You go down to the county courthouse to the register of deeds. You tell the clerk that tyou're there to do a mortgage seach on a property but you don't know how to do it yourself. You hand the clerk the address and ask to help you look it up. The property records are kept in huge bound books with hand written entries for each parcel of property that go back to the begining of time. Or at lest recorded land ownership history in that part of the world. The book will literally go back to the original "land grant," either from the king or government to the original owner.

Anyway, you cross reference the address to get a property ID number. You look up the property ID number in the big book and find the property. It will have listed the current owner and any encumberances on the land - first and second mortgages, easements, special assessments, liens, judgments - the whole works. It is written in a funny format, but the words are pretty much plain English. With a few minutes' work you can tell conclusively who owns the property, how much he owes on it and to who.

Congratulations, you've just performed a real live title search. I used to have to do it as a law clerk back in the early 90s with no more training than a year of law school and directions to the courthouse. It really is that easy to figure out.

These days a lot of counties have the same information on line. The fundamentals are the same but you can do the search from home. To find out whether you can get access over the internet you just need to call your local county register of deeds office and ask if the property ownership and lien information is on line. It probably isn't, so the only free public access is driving to the courthouse where anyone who has the time and inclination can look up all such information for free.

There are pay sites that tap into commercial databases that were compiled by people who gathered the information one property at a time to compile the private database, but you have to pay for the access and I don't know off the top of my head which ones are good. You'd likely pay three or four subscription fees to get it right.

If you can get access to Westlaw or Lexis, both databases have an asset search feature that gives you excellent access to property ownership. Depending on the lawyer's subscription, it might cost anywhere from nothing extra to a few bucks to do the search. That's the only private database I know of for sure that works.

Frankly, I'd do it the old fashioned way and stroll down to the courthouse like any Freeman and ask to see the property records.

A bit of a nerd-ball question, but do you guys use a Torrens system of land title registration down there?

Minnesota is one of the few places in the country that has Torrens and regular title property almost side by side The register of deeds has to first figure out whether the property is a Torrens or a title property and then look it up in the correct set of books.

Or you could just Google it...

Here in SoFLA they not only have the ownership records online (searchable by owner name, address, partial address, plat # and even sub-division), they also snap/archive an aerial photo of your home (from four angles) each year. One more click on "sales record" and you can see what the home sold for in the past 20 or so years. Then click on the links next to each sale and you're delieverd the deed and mortgage docs.

All viewable from the comfort of your recliner.

Hmm...Ramsey County (MN) Property Records are on-line:

Tax and Property Look Up Information - Search Criteria

Recorded documents, too:

http://rrinfo.co.ramsey.mn.us/login.asp?page=http://rrinfo.co.ramsey.mn.us/subscribe/document/index.aspx

Multnomah County, State of Oregon. Thanks.

wow... I suppose this is some sort of transition?

Snoop around here on their reswtricted trial use site. Or go down there as suggested by the web sute and MRM....Be a FREEMAN!!!!!

Multnomah County Property Tax and Recording Info

I think you can search property tax records by address here...
http://multcoproptax.com/search.asp

You really ought to just go to the courthouse...most clerks are more than willing to show you how to find the public information you want...especially if ypu're polite and appreciative. And its free.

Does PropertyShark.com work for PDX? It won't give mortgage balances, but it will tell you how much was borrowed, when. You can do some guesstimating from there.