New Features at the Franklin County Auditor’s Site help Columbus Real Estate Buyers Discover Local Sales
August 7th, 2008 categories: For Home Buyers, For Home Sellers
Finding out what is on the market is easy these days. You can search for homes for sale in Columbus and surrounding areas here or in about a million other places.
Finding out what has sold recently and where it is in relation to homes you may be interested in has always been a little harder. Home sales appear in the Dispatch every weekend and the Daily Reporter every day but without browsing the Auditor’s site for an extended period, it’s difficult to do any kind of neighborhood comparison.
Of course newish National Real Estate sites like Zillow and Trulia make that easier but we have no idea how lucky we are in Franklin County to have such a wonderful tool in the Auditor’s site. It is one of the best in the Nation and we take it for granted. Yesterday I stumbled across this recent-sales generator that looks to go back at least three years.
You get a .pdf of information about the requested house, a map of no more than a couple square blocks with your house of interest highlighted, and a list of recent sales that corresponds to the other highlighted parcels in the map.
Not a motherlode of information and not even close to what your Realtor could provide to you, but it is quick, easy, and illustrative. I could do a 2 week special report about the many tools available on the site. Go there. Play around.
Always remember to compare apples to apples and to frame any real estate information in the proper perspective.
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David
August 11th, 2008
I wasn’t able to figure out how to get to this section of the site. Can you give us click by click instructions?
Joe Peffer
August 11th, 2008
sorry folks, there seems to be some confusion regarding reaching this section.
I should have noted that you must first start with a property address.
Do a search by address or owner name. on the resulting page click on the 2008 (New) Values/Map(GIS) page.
Then you will see the gis parcel map of the property and lot. Click on Area Sales Activity to the left which will bring up a pdf of the recent sales.
On the parcel map page, you can see a history of who has owned the home dating to at least 1920, and, by clicking theme maps, map the neighborhood by sales price or number of bedrooms or a few other options.
Thanks for asking David.