Tracking down a property owner

Thanks, Wonk, for your brief tutorial on how to find a property owner. A highlight:

Once you find documents associated with your mystery owner, read through to see who signed them. "I Own This House LLC" can hold property, but it can't put its John Hancock on the dotted line -- that's where an actual human being is necessary. When I checked the deed showing Tribune as the new owner of The Sun's building, I did indeed see a human name and signature associated with the LLC that had owned it before.

Here's another useful tidbit I recently discovered on my own. I was wondering if anyone kept a list of all vacant houses. While I still haven't found anything like a "master list," I learned a back door way to find portions of it. It seems that the city's housing department posts code violations on its web site in real time. That's what they told me, real time.

So an inspector finds a house in violation of some code, enters the violation on a portable device (laptop? other?), and viola, said violation appears on the web site, baltimorehousing.org. To reverse the process, and find said violators, visit the website and click "Housing Code Enforcement." On this page you will see the link "See all active code violations for your neighborhood."

That will take you to this page: Search - Violation Notice

If you know the address, type it in. If you want to check out a whole neighborhood, do that. You'll get a page that look like this:

Note the column headers are clickable for sorting purposes..

Even cooler, if you click the map icon in the far right column, it takes you to, you guessed it, a city street map showing the subject house in its neighborhood.

But coolest of all, click the address on the map and you can jump straight to its property tax record. Viola!

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Bloggers Wanted

The Maryland Real Estate Page is looking for a few good writers.

Anyone reading this can see I haven't been able to post every day. That is my dream, and while I go on a roll once in a while, I also seem to let days go by more often than not.

If you know someone who wants to write about real estate in Maryland, whether from the perspective of an investor, a home owner, even a renter on the outside looking in, send me an email with a short explanation of how you can help.

Talk soon!

Cass

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Auction Time!

Went to my first auction today. FINALLY found time to go do it. Three foreclosures in Baltimore County, auctioned on the courthouse steps in Towson.

Very enlightening.

First, it struck me there were only three of us there, besides the auctioneer and the bank rep.  Maybe it was the weather. It's hot and humid today.  And everybody knew everybody else. They knew I was a newbie, and asked me as much, and I owned up to it. No shame in that.

Second, and of course I don't know if this is common or not, but nobody bid anything. All three auctions started with opening bids from the bank that I thought were high, and so did the other two guys. One house had a deposit requirement of $25,000. I've learned that you usually multiply by 10 to get an estimate of the amount owed on the mortgage. That would mean they want to get about $250K for the house. Sounded like there might be a real deal there, since the house sold less than three years ago for $907K.

I had looked up the current mortgage, and I could be wrong, but I only found one mortgage, for $531K, dated December, 2005. So after 2 and a half years, the outstanding balance might be in the $500K range. But the opening bid was $995K! One bidder left in a huff when he heard that number!

Finally, I was amused at how lassaiz-fair everyone was about the whole thing. People are losing their homes, and these guys are yucking it up...craziness...

Cass

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