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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