The phone book should have the location of the local registry of deeds, county clerk/recorder, or assessors office-whatever it's called. There you can find info on a particular property.
For some reason, there seems to be a LOT of private
pay databases that seem to have complete access to all that public information, but a quick google search didn't get much.
These might help:
http://usasearch.gov http://www.dre.ca.gov/consumers_sub.htm
The fastest way to find some comps is
www.realtor.com, but your realtor will have acess to a better search engine.