Locating The Land Owner

[ebath]

I routinely see windfall trees in my area. They are typically on rural property with no houses within a half-mile. And no street number.

Is there a way to locate the property owner so I can ask about obtaining these windfalls? I hate to see all these trees just rot.

Thanks,

Ed
 
   

[Radar67]

Check the County Tax records. They can locate the owners on the plat map.

[SwampDonkey]

Your state may also have an online GIS with landownership database and assessment records. NB is all on GIS and can be accessed with a web browser and a $10/month account. A lot of loggers here use it.

[Furby]

Getting the nearest address you can find will make it a little easier.
Nearest addy on each side of the area is even better.

[Phorester]

I'm a Virginia Forester.  Check out the website of the county where the property is located.  They may have some sort of interactive mapping service that you can access to find the property owners.  Otherwise, you will have to take a trip to the county courthouse and go to the Treasurers office, District Court clerk, or whatever office has the land records for that particular county.  The staff in these offices are usually very helpful and know exactly how to find the info you need.   But different VA counties do it differently.

[farmerdoug]

Yes,  Checkout your county website.  Our county has everything listed.  All you have to do is locate the area and drill down on the GIS site.

Farmerdoug

[DKinWA]

I did a little searching and found the county website.  Select "display map" to get to their mapping system.  It only works in internet explorer and I had to download a driver to get it to display correctly.  Their webpage walked me through it easily and only took a couple of minutes.  I use a lot of county websites to track down landowners and this is the first one I've come across that uses autodesk software instead of ESRI software which is a little weird.  It takes a little getting used to, but it seemed to work well.

http://www.onlinegis.net/VaRichmond/

[SwampDonkey]

The provincial site uses a home made GIS called Caris. It exports ESRI files though. But for online purposes you don't need it, you can print the screen or export a PDF document of the map.

[ebath]

Thanks for all the help. I'll be going to the Henrico County offices next week since they don't seem to have GIS information available on their website.


Ed

[DKinWA]

I did a little surfing on their website and they don't have a web based gis system, but they do have a search option that might help you out.  It allows you to search by street and a few other things. http://www.co.henrico.va.us/maps/

It looks like they are moving to gis internally and they say they have computers set up in the permit office that folks can use them to search parcel information.  I'm guessing once they have the internal system all set up, it will be a matter of time before they have a web based system up and running for the public.

[pappy]

In our little town (and I believe most towns in Maine) you can stop in at the town office and check out the tax maps,, get a photo copy of the general visinity... It has the owner, book and page #'s of the deed to get the necessary info at the Registry of Deeds... At the town office you can also get other info like lot size, the break down i.e. tillable land , wooded, name , phone # taxes paid and so on...

[PB Logging]

Farm & Ho0me Publishers
PO  Box 305
Belmond, IA  50421
641 444 3508
www.farmandhomepublishers.com

Publish's plat books, county directories, wall maps, cd roms, book form, etc for a very large part of the country.   Last year I paid about $40 per county plat book.  Guys have been around since 1981 and I must say I've had great luck with them here in the Mid-west. 

& FYI outside purchasing from them and possibly doing some advertising with them in 2008 I've got no other affiliation with these guys. 

Hope that helps.

Make it a safe day!!!

[PineNut]

I go to the county office and take my camera with me. When I find documents of interest, I just photograph them. It is much cheaper than the 25 cents a page they charge for copies.

[ebath]

I did a little surfing on their website and they don't have a web based gis system, but they do have a search option that might help you out.  It allows you to search by street and a few other things. http://www.co.henrico.va.us/maps/

Thanks DKinWA: Your link gets me the GPIN for the property. That allows me to get the owner information with just a phone call to the county. I tried it yesterday and it worked great! Unfortunately, the logs were already spoken for 

Now that I have a method for finding the land owner, I can start asking about all these downed trees in my area!

Ed

 

[ErikC]

  Around here if you know a realtor that is an easy way to find out. I have done it several times with 100% success. May help someone who can't use the above methods.

Erik