6 Reasons to Use a Paid Search Service (Instead of a Free One) to Find Real Estate Records

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

When an attorney or real estate investor is trying to find out who owns a particular property, discover the assessed value, or find the legal description, the tax assessor database can be a helpful source – especially if that information is available online. Most, but not all, communities have created databases and uploaded property documents to the Internet.

In many cases, real estate public records are available online for free. Whether you are retrieving information from the local assessor, probate judge, or county recorder, there are hundreds of links to assessor and recorder offices around the country to help you complete a property records search. Oftentimes, these free online sites will help you find public records for properties by county, or by state directory. These services, while extremely helpful, are limited in scope.

Similar drawbacks apply even to the free national real estate websites. For example, Zillow is widely used in regard to looking up the current estimated market value of a property. This is a super benefit for investors, attorneys, and mortgage lenders. Many sites are available online that allow you to search addresses and properties, but do these free online sites connect the addresses to the property owner? No. This means you are not done surfing the Net. You now have the location, but not the owner! Dot dot dot… This is when you would want to utilize a paid public records search database.

Looking for free records, whether in local government websites, or national real estate databases like Zillow, can be an insanely piecemeal and time consuming approach to the task. One landowner may have properties scattered among different counties or even states. It is all too easy to miss a crucial piece of the puzzle. To maximize the best use of your time and energy, a database with cohesive, national coverage will permit you to quickly gather your data so you can move on to the fun part – making deals!

Here are 6 reasons to use a paid search service instead of a free one to find real estate records:

  1. A county or state’s complementary database only allows you to search by an address and NOT a name.
  2. Real estate assessor records are not always online and free to use.
  3. The county or state’s free online database does not link the address to the name of the owner/s.
  4. If you need to run a high volume of searches – batch skip tracing is the solution – but this may not be possible on local databases.
  5. If you are searching for an individual’s complete real estate holdings, you will need to pull records from a nationwide database in which records are linked to the owner.
  6. The owner of the property is a business or LLC and you want to locate all the owners or businesses of the property.

Paid databases such as Tracers allow you to easily do a thorough, nationwide property assessment with our comprehensive collection of Deed, Mortgage, & Tax Assessor Records. You can find the owners of residential homes or commercial buildings. Limited Liability company partners, principals, or property owners can also be verified in a single search. Use one convenient, centralized database that supplies connectivity among records and streamline your workflow!

The Tracers interface will provide you with property records and information – but what if the property owner is hard to trace? Our skip tracing people searches come in handy here. Within the Tracers database, locate the property information, complete an asset search, find contacts, addresses, phone appends, and email addresses. If you have a large number of addresses or potential names, our batch skip tracing services allow you to search thousands of records at a very low cost.

With Tracers proprietary data linking technology, sift through billions of public records so you are able to:

  • Get valuable contact information (including hundreds of millions of phone numbers not listed in directory assistance).
  • Generate reports by a person, business, or location that summarize different types of information—addresses, voter registrations, licenses, real property, and more.
  • Piece together hidden connections – connect names, addresses, phone numbers, and much more between entities that don’t necessarily have a record in common.

The choice is yours – enhance your search practices with Tracers’ powerful, intuitive interface and one stop searching, or spend hours of your workday watching dots circling on your screen, sifting through myriad Google search results, and navigating back and forth from one website to another. As they say – time is money. Get started with Tracers and… happy searching!

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