In this post, we explain how to find the owner of a specific commercial property, as well as how to find people and companies that own commercial buildings. We answer these questions:
How do I find who owns a commercial or business property?
How do I check parcel numbers and tax records of property?
How to find property owners phone numbers? Email addresses?
If you are looking to find out who owns a particular property, whether a building, warehouse, industrial complex, undeveloped commercial land or other commercial property, these are public records. Property records in the United States are public records, and we'll explain where to find them.
For those of you who are looking to grow your network and connect with companies that own and operate commercial buildings, we'll cover that too.
Who Owns Commercial Properties?
In the United States, property ownership records are considered to be public records. The openness of the information, the theory goes, is for owners' protection. Without having an open record of a deed or title of ownership, imagine the unscrupulous people who would try to make a claim to a property. Deeds and titles are published to establish ownership. And when ownership has been established, you can buy, sell, change and borrow against the property.
As Investopedia explains, publicly filing property records creates a “traceable chain of title,” which matters when collecting taxes and transferring ownership. There are more than 100 types of real property documents that can be recorded, the most common of which are deeds, liens, foreclosures, mortgages, easements, and plats.
Now that we understand why property ownership information is public, we can dive into commercial property lookup tactics.
How to Find a Property Owner for Free
For the most part, how to find a property owner for free is relatively easy. Property ownership records are maintained by local governments, including townships, counties, and cities. Finding out how to contact those property owners, however, is a whole different story. We'll get to that in the next section.
Where to go to find commercial property owners
The first place to look is at a county assessor's office, so named because they assess property values for tax purposes. County assessors might also be referred to as county appraisers in some states.
In addition to the property address, you might want to find the parcel number and nearest intersection. In our experience, not all counties' online search engines are user-friendly. You have to enter the information exactly as it is stored in their database; otherwise, you come up empty-handed. So the first thing to know is how the assessor's office handles data.
Example: Manual commercial property search
To illustrate this, we looked at who owns 875 N. Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. That's in Cook County, Illinois, and it's the famous John Hancock Center skyscraper.
First, go to www.cookcountyassessor.com/address-search and enter the house number, which is the same as the commercial property number (875); the direction, which is north (N); and the street name, which is Michigan. When we included “Ave” or “Avenue,” we got zero results. When we left off the road type, we struck gold with the Cook County Assessor's Office.
This is what we mean when we say you have to enter the search criteria exactly as the assessor's office requires it. The property search engines are not like Google, which will look for “something close”; you'll need to exactly match the way the data is stored in their database. This quirk is not unique to Cook County.
Another way to look up commercial property is by finding the parcel number. Some municipalities call the parcel number something else, such as “property index number,” as Cook County does in Illinois. If you have the parcel or PIN, you don't likely need the address.
To find a parcel or PIN, however, you'll need to either look at a real estate listing or at an assessor's map. Many assessors' offices publish parcel maps online. In Cook County, Illinois, for example, they link to CookViewer, an interactive map. In the image below, you can see 875 N. Michigan Ave. on the map, as well as the parcel information for surrounding buildings.
What about residential property ownership?
Residential property ownership records are also public information. Some residential properties are owned by individuals, couples, families, trusts, banks, and private businesses, which make it difficult to find homeowner contact information. Finding homeowner contact information is beyond the scope of Biscred, as well as this article. If you're looking for who owns a property near you, the best place to begin is with your local assessor's office.
How to Find Contact Details of a Property Owner
In the downtown Chicago commercial building example, we found through the Cook County Assessor's Office that the property is owned by Madison Capital, based in New York City.
If you're a vendor or service provider looking to reach the property's owners, then your search has just begun. You'll spend the next couple of hours searching Google for property tax records, company websites, employees' names and social media profiles to find the right people to reach.
“You're going to spend 80% of your time finding the contact information, leaving 20% of your time to build a relationship,” said Ben Hertz Biscred General Manager. “We believe you should spend 20% of your time finding the right contacts and 80% of the time building relationships.”
With a rich dataset that scrapes multiple sites for real-time information about commercial properties, you have ownership and management information at your fingertips. The research has been done for you. All you have to do now is drill down to the most relevant companies and build your prospect list.
Example: Commercial property research using datasets
In this example, using Biscred's CRE database, we search for companies with headquarters in Chicago that may have ownership in commercial properties -- specifically in the asset category of office buildings -- in Cook County, as well as throughout the United States.
Biscred reveals contact information for 311 companies with headquarters in Chicago, which own or operate commercial office buildings.
Users can search for specific types of properties, such as entertainment facilities, government buildings, retail centers, schools, senior living facilities and dozens more. Select the records you want, save them to a list in Biscred or download them to a .csv file to be uploaded to your sales CRM.
Biscred also provides you company-level information. Returning to our John Hancock Building example, we enter “Madison Capital” in the company name field and find three results:
Now we have access to contact information for at least 25 people working at Madison Capital.
“Data-driven prospecting is replacing the old style of buying stale lead lists and manually sifting through hundreds of pages of information,” Ben Hertz said. “We are continually updating the datasets, which makes the data highly valuable.”
With datasets like Biscred, it's easier than ever to not only look up who owns a commercial property but also locate and contact the property owners and managers.
Get in touch with us to see how it works for your CRE-related business.
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