Real Estate, Public Info, Privacy, the Internet, and You.
Many real estate companies, if not most of them, have some sort of search functionality. These systems are so flexible, it is easy to narrow down your search for a specific price range of home in a specific area.
One such site is the Edina Realty property search page. Slap in a few parameters, and you’ve easily found the most expensive house on the market. Interesting, no?
Quite often there will be no address listed. My guess is that this was done on purpose, in order to keep gawkers (like me) away. Normally, you’d have to go through a real estate agent in order to even get close to this place, if it wasn’t listed. On top of that, you’d probably have a hard time convincing the agent you were actuallty interested in (or capable of) shelling out $19.5 million for this house.
But you want to find out where the houses with 7-car garages, 10 bathrooms, and 13,000 square feet are. On the bottom of this listing, there is a very useful piece of information called “Tax/Property ID”. At first glance, this is sort of not very useful, until you realize that the Property ID is unique to a county (and possibly a state).
This is where public records come into play. The taxes paid on every property is public information. On top of that, many counties, such as Hennepin County in Minnesota, have put all this public information online. In this case, the Property Information Search is what you’re looking for, generally found through the Assesor’s office.
PINS allows you to not only look up information by a street address, but also Property ID. Bingo. Now we can find out where that house with 10 bathrooms is. Pluggin the ID into the search, we are immediately given a large set of information, including street address, owner name, owner address (because many people own more than one house!), sale date, sale price, property taxes paid/due, etc. All very useful.
In this case, these people paid property taxes higher than my salary, which is very humbling. Plugging their address into Mapquest gave me directions to the place, and now I can conduct my own tour of the neighborhood without having to deal with a real estate agent.
Going through some of the more expensive houses in the county, I was able to find the house that famous cyclist Greg Lemond is selling for $5.5 Million. Because people need 10 bathrooms and 13,000 square feet to live in.