All Forum Posts by: Aaron H.

County assessor/treasurer's site. Then google their name, or use a skip tracing company when necessary.

Welcome to BP! I know there are several other BP members in Logan that are active on the site, so you should be able to link up with some folks locally as well.

Logan can be a tough market for rentals since the rent rates are pretty low compared to the purchase price and there's not a lot of inventory.  But it sounds like you're doing great with your triplex house hack.

The value on the assessor's site often (usually) has no relation to the actual market value of the house. It's just the value that the county uses to determine how much the owner owes in taxes. If you want to know what it's acutally worth at the moment, you need to do a comparable sales analysis. If you're not sure how to do that, ask a local agent to give you a hand.

If you're just asking how to tell if the assessed value is for the current year, then it depends on your county and how often they do an assessment.

Most counties, no - try:

"<your county> assessor's office" - that's usually who has the property records.

I have no personal experience with any, so I'd be hesitant to recommend anyone - but I know it's been discussed on BP quite a bit, so there's probably some recommendations out there...

Check the BP FilePlace section or whatever it's called - several folks including Brandon Turner have posted full scripts they use.

Go through county records to find the owner's name and address, then do an online search to find a phone number - you may have to pay a skip-tracing company or similar to get the phone number, those aren't always public info.

You can either a) Put in separate meters from the utility company, b) Put sub-meters from private companies in the units themselves (e.g. True Submeter, other companies), or c) Bill back to the tenants a percentage of the overall use, without metering (e.g. RUBS). There are variations on the above, but that's what I understand to be the main options.

Bottom line, if you don't feel like you're getting the deal you need, you should walk. You don't owe anyone anything when you're purchasing a property, especially when the selling party is a moving target.

I honestly didn't read the whole story, but that's kinda the point - if you're not happy, you did the right thing.

It could mean a lot of things - but county data is notortiously incomplete and bad, and values for taxation very rarely track actual market value. You need to figure out the actual condition of the house, any recent work, and do your own comps analysis to determine ARV.