Real Estate HowTo: Searching Tax Records
Here is the first part in our HowTo series:
HowTo: Searching Tax Records
The purpose of the HowTo series is to educate home buyers. While I'd love to hang around the blog helping everyone hunt down information, I realize that I can probably help everyone much more by showing you HowTo find the info you need.
The first part in the series is HowTo track down public tax information. The public tax databases contain a wealth of important information that will help you become educated homebuyers. Until recently, searching the tax records involved a trip down to the county records office, and probably the better part of an afternoon. Not anymore, with just a few clicks I'm going to turn you into Sherlock Homes (what a terrible pun).
First, here are the links I use:
Morris County Tax Board
Monmouth County Tax Board
www.taxrecords.com
Bergen County Tax Board (taxrecords.com database)
Why so many links? Open them up, take a look, not every site has the most up-to-date database, and some sites (like Monmouth) allow you to search more than one county.
So lets begin:
1) First we need to find the address of a home we are interested in. For this we'll go over to ForSaleByOwner.com, you can use the link over to the right of the page if you would like to support the site (I'm still waiting to make my first penny off those by the way).
2) At the top of the page there is a section called "Buying a home", lets type in Madison for the city, and use NJ for the state, click go.
3) Choose listing #20527608 ($599,000). Not every home has past sales records, if the home was owned for a very long period of time, it's possible that you will not find past sales records. Also, if the home is new, you may not find sales records. I picked Madison at random and chose this listing at random (but verified that it indeed had sales data).
4) Grab the address, the address is important, it's the key we'll be using to search the databases (for those that would rather not go to forsalebyowner.com, the address is "36 Albright".
5) Click the link for the Monmouth Tax Board, you'll see a page with a somewhat complicated form, don't be scared, it's easy.
6) Select "Morris - 2005" as your County, Select "Madison Borough" as your District, and Select "Advanced Search" as your Search Format.
7) Scroll down the page until you see the field marked "Street Addr", type in "36 Albright", the street suffix is not necessary (and I find it throws off the search on some tools, so don't bother). Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Search" button.
8) You should be rewarded with a single entry returned. Click the "More Information" button on the left side of the record.
9) This is it, you've done it. We see the owners, we can verify what they paid for the home and when they purchased it, the assessed value and what the taxes are.
10) Click your back button twice to return back to the search screen. This time, we'll only use "Albright" as the Street Address. Why? Because we'd like to see the other properties in the neighborhood.
11) Now we'll go through the Morris County Tax Board site. Why? You might like it better, it might be updated more recently, the Monmouth Site might be down, It doesn't matter, just go.
12) At the top of the page you should see "SR1A's", hover your mouse over the button and you'll see "Search SR1A's" pop up, click it.
13) Click "Search SR1A's By Property Location" under "Select Search Critera". A box should pop up with a handful of fields.
14) Under District select "Madison", enter "36" for House Number and "Albright" for Street Address. You can leave SR1A Year blank. Click "Search".
15) Bingo, you'll see a similar record as we did in the first search. You may need to scroll the browser window to the right to reveal the "Detail" button. Click it when you find it. You'll see much of the same info as you did before. You can go back and click the "Tax" button if you'd like some more information on the property or tax.
16) I'll let you go through the Bergen and taxrecords.com sites on your own. Most of these follow the same pattern, so once you've mastered the search, you'll be comfortable on most any tax search database.
You've now become tax record experts, and are probably wondering why I wanted you all to become tax record experts. It's simple really, because we need to know what the current owner purchased the home for, and when they purchased it. Home values typically appreciate at about the rate of inflation. So we can use the inflation numbers to calculate the inflation adjusted price of the home in today's dollars. This will give you a good starting point for which to base your offer. "But wait," you ask, "what about the asking price?" Asking price? We here at NNJBubble believe no such thing, you can ask what you'd like, it doesn't mean we're going to pay it. We only pay what we believe the asset to be worth, no more. We don't care what the neighbor got for his place, we don't care how well the market did in the past year, we simply don't care.
Refuse to buy into the mania and refuse to pay the asking price. If the seller rejects your offer, walk away, do not buy, do not bend, and do not let this process become emotional.
Caveat Emptor,
Grim
HowTo: Searching Tax Records
The purpose of the HowTo series is to educate home buyers. While I'd love to hang around the blog helping everyone hunt down information, I realize that I can probably help everyone much more by showing you HowTo find the info you need.
The first part in the series is HowTo track down public tax information. The public tax databases contain a wealth of important information that will help you become educated homebuyers. Until recently, searching the tax records involved a trip down to the county records office, and probably the better part of an afternoon. Not anymore, with just a few clicks I'm going to turn you into Sherlock Homes (what a terrible pun).
First, here are the links I use:
Morris County Tax Board
Monmouth County Tax Board
www.taxrecords.com
Bergen County Tax Board (taxrecords.com database)
Why so many links? Open them up, take a look, not every site has the most up-to-date database, and some sites (like Monmouth) allow you to search more than one county.
So lets begin:
1) First we need to find the address of a home we are interested in. For this we'll go over to ForSaleByOwner.com, you can use the link over to the right of the page if you would like to support the site (I'm still waiting to make my first penny off those by the way).
2) At the top of the page there is a section called "Buying a home", lets type in Madison for the city, and use NJ for the state, click go.
3) Choose listing #20527608 ($599,000). Not every home has past sales records, if the home was owned for a very long period of time, it's possible that you will not find past sales records. Also, if the home is new, you may not find sales records. I picked Madison at random and chose this listing at random (but verified that it indeed had sales data).
4) Grab the address, the address is important, it's the key we'll be using to search the databases (for those that would rather not go to forsalebyowner.com, the address is "36 Albright".
5) Click the link for the Monmouth Tax Board, you'll see a page with a somewhat complicated form, don't be scared, it's easy.
6) Select "Morris - 2005" as your County, Select "Madison Borough" as your District, and Select "Advanced Search" as your Search Format.
7) Scroll down the page until you see the field marked "Street Addr", type in "36 Albright", the street suffix is not necessary (and I find it throws off the search on some tools, so don't bother). Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the "Search" button.
8) You should be rewarded with a single entry returned. Click the "More Information" button on the left side of the record.
9) This is it, you've done it. We see the owners, we can verify what they paid for the home and when they purchased it, the assessed value and what the taxes are.
10) Click your back button twice to return back to the search screen. This time, we'll only use "Albright" as the Street Address. Why? Because we'd like to see the other properties in the neighborhood.
11) Now we'll go through the Morris County Tax Board site. Why? You might like it better, it might be updated more recently, the Monmouth Site might be down, It doesn't matter, just go.
12) At the top of the page you should see "SR1A's", hover your mouse over the button and you'll see "Search SR1A's" pop up, click it.
13) Click "Search SR1A's By Property Location" under "Select Search Critera". A box should pop up with a handful of fields.
14) Under District select "Madison", enter "36" for House Number and "Albright" for Street Address. You can leave SR1A Year blank. Click "Search".
15) Bingo, you'll see a similar record as we did in the first search. You may need to scroll the browser window to the right to reveal the "Detail" button. Click it when you find it. You'll see much of the same info as you did before. You can go back and click the "Tax" button if you'd like some more information on the property or tax.
16) I'll let you go through the Bergen and taxrecords.com sites on your own. Most of these follow the same pattern, so once you've mastered the search, you'll be comfortable on most any tax search database.
You've now become tax record experts, and are probably wondering why I wanted you all to become tax record experts. It's simple really, because we need to know what the current owner purchased the home for, and when they purchased it. Home values typically appreciate at about the rate of inflation. So we can use the inflation numbers to calculate the inflation adjusted price of the home in today's dollars. This will give you a good starting point for which to base your offer. "But wait," you ask, "what about the asking price?" Asking price? We here at NNJBubble believe no such thing, you can ask what you'd like, it doesn't mean we're going to pay it. We only pay what we believe the asset to be worth, no more. We don't care what the neighbor got for his place, we don't care how well the market did in the past year, we simply don't care.
Refuse to buy into the mania and refuse to pay the asking price. If the seller rejects your offer, walk away, do not buy, do not bend, and do not let this process become emotional.
Caveat Emptor,
Grim
15 Comments:
Hey your giving away the tricks of the trade! Actually, I believe everyone should have free access to this info. Kudos! I would have posted it here myself but Ijust found your blog and all the associated bubble blogs. Good job!
Grim,
I love the way you sum it up in the last few paragraphs. It reminds my of those scenes in the Godfather II where Michael dictates who's doing the buying and selling and at what price.
That's what we need to do, take on a Michael Corleone attitiude with these sellers. We can all "be like Mike." lol!
Gary
Grim,
Stop it. You are starting to worry the manipulative real estate industry.
They do not want buyers to know this info.
do not leverage your life away.
BUYERS STRIKE!
The only reason I used 'for sale by owner' was to get an address of a home for sale.
How you get whatever address you are interested in, is up to you. Whether you drive by a place, have access to the MLS data, get email updates of new listings, work with an agent, etc.
For kicks, try and look up your own home, homes of neighbors, the home of your real estate agent, etc.
And yes, we're giving away the store here. Very few people know that this data is available.
There is a concept in economics called "perfect competition". It describes a hypothetical market where each market participant has equal power within the market. There is one prerequisite to perfect competition that I believe doesn't exist in the real estate market, that is, the concept of "perfect and complete information". That is, where all buyers and have sellers to any and all information that drives that market.
The Real Estate industry has worked hard to keep information private, within their realm, thus depriving consumers of the information they need. This gives the real estate industry and sellers an advantage over buyers.
I am trying my hardest to eliminate that advantage by providing readers as much information as I can.
Caveat Emptor!
grim
Mike,
This was only the first part in a series! I wasn't going to give everything away in one shot. I'm planning on addressing your question in an upcoming part. Now, I'm not going to get your hopes up, nothing will beat direct access to the MLS systems, but what I'll show you is a good substitute if you don't want to deal with an agent.
I need you guys to keep coming back, day after day, week after week!
The only real thing I get out of this blog is the satisfaction of seeing how many people read it every day. Seeing traffic increase day after day is really my biggest motivation; it shows me that the readers are interested. A blog without traffic is a blog that dies a quiet death.
Thanks again everyone!
grim
So lets try to put this to some good use now..
Again, I'll use FSBO as it's just a convenient way of finding an address of a for sale property..
Upper Montclair FSBO
So we take a look at that listing, it's on Macopin in Montclair, and they are asking $849,900.
Use your new found tax records to pull back the sales price and date.. In case you can't wait.
The Frasers purchased this home on 7/30/99 for $450,000.
So what is it worth today? Well, if we just take an off-the-cuff estimate of 5% appreciation a year (far better than historical home appreciation), the (generously) inflation adjusted value of the home today is about $603,000. By my calculation the home is approximately 30% overvalued.
Long time readers will recall me talking about a magic number, of 30%. Here is yet another example of that number popping up.
Caveat Emptor,
Grim
Well Richie let the cat out of the bag, so maybe I'll post up the next HowTo today!
grim
I've never used the domania site because I've just got around to going through the registration process. Others have told me that it was useful as well.
I'll play around with it and let everyone know!
Grim
grim
thanks for the info...have spent the last hour on a spreadsheet to calculate the "overappreciation" vs original purchase price on about 15 townhouses..Using an extremely generous 7% growth rate...the lowest I found was 9% overpriced..highest was 45% overpriced (or that guy just got a great deal when he bought..he's asking for a 29% annual growth over 6 years!) Most were between 12 and 20% overpriced..and most have already been marked down
Grim rules!
just found some info on a house I am thinking about on the market for $370K. In 1996 it sold for $128K! Crazy. Anyone want to help me with the math...how overpriced is this asking price?
7% is extremely high..
I'm working on a javascript calculator where you can plug in the purchase price and date and the calculator will adjust for inflation along with a positive and negative adjustment (i.e. Inflation + 1%).
grim
I went with 7% because i always had heard housing should go up 2x the rate of inflation...(is that a good rule of thumb?)..i never believed those govt stats of zero inflation so figured 3.5% is probably close?
another interesting point is as i continued and analyzed the for sale by owner townhouses these were dramatically more overpriced than the regular listings from realtors....(average about 30% overpriced vs 15%)..at least it looks like realtors are talking "some" sense in to sellers.
I love your blog. I'm about to purchase my first house and I'm so happy to see your information. I have some homework to do now.
by the way how can I calculate the inflation number? do you have a formula that I could use.
thank you
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