cheapest way or site to find mortgage balances?

[Michael Ringwood ll]

What is the cheapest way or site to find mortgage balances? Im looking for a reliable source of course.

[Erica Bird]

NETR is a website you can use to quickly navigate to the websites for the Assessor, Treasurer, and Clerk. . Just select the state and county. 

Most of the metro counties in Oklahoma have online property records search.  Oklahoma County is completely accessible and the easiest to navigate, others such as Cleveland and Canadian you have to call the clerk to set you up a username and password but it's quick and free.  Other counties you have to pay a subscription to in order to be able to access.

From the Assessor's page you can get the legal description, and with the legal description you can do a search on the Clerk's page for all of the mortgages, liens, deeds, etc. that have been filed or released on the property.  Once you pull up the mortgage usually you can find most of the info you need to estimate the balance on the 1st, 2nd, or the 2nd or 3rd to last pages - i.e. what the amount of the note was, what the initial date and maturity date are, and occasionally they will even reference an interest rate if you're lucky.  You can plug that in to an amortization calculator to get a general idea of how much they may still owe.

A caveat, documents are regularly mis-indexed so liens can apply that you don't find online. I would not recommend only doing your own online search as a basis of determining all the liens that may effect to complete your purchase.  But this might help you determine what price to offer, save some initial time up front.  But if you're actually going under contract nothing replaces an attorney's title exam.