How to Check Who Owns a Property for FREE

How can I check who owns a property? How to find out who owns a property for free?

I'm going to show you how to find out who owns a property for free! You can do this search online, or with a phone call. It only takes a few minutes and is the most important thing you need to check when going through your land-buying checklist.

Can You Check Who Owns a Property?

Ok, so let's get started. There are multiple ways you can check and see how to find out who owns land in the US. A couple of services like AgentPro247, DataTree, RealQuest PRO, give you this ability. These are very useful services! But, normally you need a monthly subscription to access their data. And that's great if you're a land investor or have a career in real estate. But what if you don't? What if you're just an average Joe who wants to buy land?

If you are a Joe, don't worry – I've got you covered because this method I'm going to show you is FREE.

So I'm going to use an example property here, in Maricopa County Arizona. I don't own this property, in fact, I don't know who owns it, but we're going to find out!

How Do I Find out Who Owns a Property?

It is so important that you do this right at the beginning of your Due Diligence process because you could get caught in a scam or be buying property from someone who doesn't have the right to sell it. And that person may not even know that they don't have the right to sell it. They might have been caught in a scam themselves, or they might have lost the property because they didn't keep up with the property taxes.

If you want to make sure that you buy your next property correctly, meaning you buy it from the current owner and the title of the property gets transferred successfully to you, you need to check and see who is listed as the current owner.

You will need 2 things to find out who owns a piece of land. You need to know the county that the land is in, so in our case that is Maricopa County. You will need the parcel number.

Craigslist Maricopa Property Search Example

If you found a piece of property you're thinking about buying on any of the Land sites, Craigslist, even Facebook Marketplace, you can get the parcel number right from the listing or just ask the seller and they will be able to provide you with that info.

Note: If the seller does not have the parcel number or cannot get it for you – that is a big red flag. It increases the likelihood of that seller being a scam or not having the rights to actually sell you that property.

How to Check Who Owns a Property (for FREE!)?

Okay, now, we need to find the Assessor's page for the County, and see if they have an online parcel search. I'm going to head over to google here and type in 'Mariopa County parcel search'. Every county page will be different. You want to look for keywords on the Assessor's page such as 'online parcel search' or 'Assessor parcel search'.

Here is Maricopa County's Assessor page. I'm going to click on the link that says 'County Assessor's Parcel Viewer'.

On the page that follows, you will need to accept the County's disclaimer. And here is Maricopa County's Assessor online database.

So now you're going to need that second piece of information – the parcel number (remember for our example the parcel number is 50394112). I'll paste that in the 'Parcel Number' box and click 'Search'.

Okay so that's the parcel number we typed in and searched for and here's our result.

It looks like our example property is owned by a gentleman of the name Larry Zappanati.

‍

‍