Hello, as the title may suggest I have recently found a building in my town that appears to be abandoned but the I have only found one listing that has no actual information on it besides square feet and how much it was sold for. Besides that, there was a chain link fence around it, and appeared to be a school, but appeared to have some sort of shipping area in the back for a semi truck or something. I’ve tried looking up the address in google and property record sites and have found nothing. I was wondering if there would be any other way to possibly figure out what this place used to be?

visit the city/town hall to find out what the location was... it's a good place to start figuring out a location.

i had to do that on a place up here... and the people at the town hall were incredibly helpful.

If it's available, and depending on how long it's been derelict for, old Google street view imagery can ID something if it was still open when one of their cars went past in years gone.

There's a lot of outdated information online and that's exactly what you're looking for.

Google the street address. You should be able to find the name of the companies that have used that address. You may have to go through several pages of search results to find something.

I just Googled a street address for a place that's been abandoned (and is still abandoned) since 2007 and found quite a bit of information.

Once you have a company name, you can start searching that to find out what they did.

If you aren't having luck on google or the common property searches, find the area's Real Estate Assessor or appraiser's website. Find an email address for the assessor and contact away. A lot of county's and cities have links to their GIS property maps or databases on that page too. Dig around.

Most of the time, if you aren't finding any surface information you can find some answers in tax records concerning the property - the Real Estate Assessor for the area would help you in this respect.

If you met a dead end there, search and contact the area's City/County Clerk's office. They're usually kind enough to point you in the right direction. Just google "{AREA} County/City Clerk", find the email or phone number and again - contact away. You'd be asking for property tax records for the address in question.


Good luck.

Surprised this hasn't been suggested yet. Try exploring it, or at least looking in through the windows.

Post by Steed Surprised this hasn't been suggested yet. Try exploring it, or at least looking in through the windows

Yes, the subtle yet humble approach, this is the way.

~O

Posted by Steed Surprised this hasn't been suggested yet. Try exploring it, or at least looking in through the windows.

madness! how dare you propose such a mundane approach!!! BLASPHEMY! :p

One thing nobody has mentioned yet that is useful as well is a county treasurer website. In many US counties (at least in all of the counties I’ve tried this) the county where the property is keeps public records of who’s paying property taxes on it. If you can get a bead on who’s paying the taxes, you can figure out who owns the land. For example if the tax on the property you’re looking for is being paid by the school district, that’s a likely indicator that the address is or used to be a school.

Happy exploring!