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Free Public Records Directory

Over the last two years we have seen the majority of county tax, assessor and records divisions coming online and providing a quite a bit of useful information via the web.

Today I decided to try out Public Records Online , Northwest Location Services, Inc. 2007, to look up the deed and title of a lot in Panama City Beach, Florida. I wanted to see if the Title/Escrow company prematurely recorded the deed and title despite incomplete closing documents.

I found the link to Free Public Records by starting a search on “bay county florida records” and it popped up in the list of top three organic search results (organic means it is not a sponsored/paid listing). Free Records provides links to county and state level public records for every state and county in the United States.
Their free directory provides a geographically oriented directory of public record resources for criminal court records, civil court records, marriage records, divorce records, real and personal property records, deeds, mortgages, liens and other recorded documents, jail and inmate records, sex offender records, wanted persons records, and many more free public records

Locating the public records you need is relatively easy as you can search by City and State, by Zip Code, or just select a state and then a county from a list they provide.

Using Public Records to find your state and county is the easy part. Once you locate your county you end up on their respective sites where things change dramatically. It seems like each and every county uses a different approach to looking up records and not all of them are very intuitive.

Once I got to the Bay County Clerk of Courts website, I entered in the book and page of the lot, then hit search. The info I received back was a surprise - namely a Warranty Deed from 1960. Arggh - where the heck is my record?

So I back-arrowed to the main search area and did a “lastname,firstname” search - JackPot.

Bay County, thus makes it easy to find records. In many other counties you have to locate the parcel number (in a separate county website) before you can look up property information. And yes, there are still counties that do not have all their information online yet or are lagging behind in getting their recording done.

Happy Searching.

To Your Success

Mark Schwartz

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