When a person or company wants to buy a property (commercial or residential), it is important to know who currently owns the property. Property owners can include individuals, families, mortgage companies, and other businesses. Anyone can find out who owns a property, whether or not the property is currently on the market. It will likely take longer than expected to find this information, but there are both free and paid options any adult can choose from.

Use a Paid Service

One of the easiest ways to find out who has a mortgage on a property is to hire a service to do the research. While mortgage information services can be used just to find out who owns a property, they can also be used to gather other helpful information and statistics about the property and the neighborhood. This extra information is especially helpful for people who are looking to buy commercial real estate, who plan to buy an apartment building, or a home that will be rented out.

Check Online Records

Since who owns a property is considered public information, anyone can look up homeowner records for free. One of the best ways to do this is to look up your city or county’s property or residential website. From there, anyone can search up an address to find the property owner. If someone is having difficulty navigating the website, there will usually be a chatbox on the site that he or she can use to connect with a real person or AI that can help with the search. While doing this is free, this search is likely to produce less information than a paid service would.

Go to the County Records Office

If someone prefers to do things in person, the old-fashioned way, then he or she can head over to the county records office. Here, he or she can ask for ownership records on a specific property. Depending on how tech-savvy the office is, the clerk there may be able to pull up digital records right away. However, in places where records have not been fully digitized yet, it could take up to a few days or longer to find the records. Either way, this service is usually free or inexpensive.

No matter why a person wants to find out who owns a specific property, he or she has a wealth of resources they can use to find that information. Most of these resources are free or inexpensive. Those people do pay for are likely to contain more information.