Find previous sale prices of homes?

[DougK62]

I'm in the market for a new house and I had once heard that there is a way to find out what houses have previously sold for. I'm looking at a house now and it'd be great to know this for it and the houses surrounding it. Is something like this available somewhere? Who has access to these figures?

Thanks.

 

[GtPrOjEcTX]

do you have a realtor? when I was thinking of what to offer she showed me a couple pages of what properties right by sold for and what they were (sq.ft, #rooms, etc.)

not sure how she got the info though.

 

[DougK62]

I don't have a "buyers" agent and don't plan to get one.

So the information is out there - anyone know how I can get my hands on it without an agent?

 

[vi edit]

Your county assessors may have a website available that will list current appraised value as well as the purchase price of the home each time it was bought.

If it doesn't, you can go down to the county courthouse or the assessor building itself and inquire there about it.

 

[marleymarl]

this might be helpful

 

[HomeBrewerDude]

check with your city's tax assessor. Here in Madison, you can look up a property by street address and see the general information about the house and lot, as well as the assessed value (city assessment) and previous sale amounts.

 

[DougK62]

Thanks guys! I'll check it out.

 

Call up a realtor and ask if they can look up the house in MLS.
Or call Real Property dept. for that county/town, or call the assessor for the town.

 

[T2T III]

Originally posted by: vi_edit
Your county assessors may have a website available that will list current appraised value as well as the purchase price of the home each time it was bought.

If it doesn't, you can go down to the county courthouse or the assessor building itself and inquire there about it.

In my county, all of this information is Web-based. All you need to know is the address. In about 5 minutes, you can have all the sale prices of the homes - and the dates when the transaction occured.

 

If you're in NY, I can look it up for you.
I have access to all the assessor db's.

 

[loup garou]

It's called a chain of title. Get the info on the latest owner from the assessor and start working backwards through title records. A lot of states have web based access to assessor's info as mentioned. You can go all the way back to when the property was incorporated into the county (if you care to )!

When I was in New Orleans, they didn't have a web db, I sat in the basement of the civil district court and traced property transactions in handwritten logbooks back to exchanges of slaves for land, and even further back, all the records were in French! It was really interesting (project for a New Orleans Architecture class).

 

[NogginBoink]

Note that the tax assessment value and the most recent selling price are not the same thing.

The tax assessment is usually quite a bit less than the selling value of the property.

In Dallas county (Texas), it seems that when a house is sold a new tax assessment is done that reasonably reflects the property's market value. So if you're looking at tax records, it might be wise to look at properties that were recently sold.