July 18th, 2022

The DIY Investigator: Finding Property Tax Records

As a full-service, professional private investigation firm serving Colorado, New Mexico, Florida and South Carolina, one with over 30+ years experience, we get a lot of calls to the office on a daily basis from individuals inquiring about our services. Many callers have never hired a private investigator and have no idea what it cost to hire a professional investigator. We understand that not everyone can afford to hire an experienced investigator and many have very little money at all but still desperately need help. It's with that in mind that we've decided to publish self-help tips for those who need information, but have no money with which to hire an investigator. We're calling it "The DIY Investigator" and it's just our small way of giving back to our community. If it only helps one person out there find the information they need, we'll consider it time well spent.

Our search today is to find property tax records for an individual or particular property. We're searching in El Paso County, Colorado, but this type of search can be conducted in every state. Some states won't have as much information as others and you may have to go down to the County Assessor's office in person, but this should give you a general idea of how to conduct this type of search. We'll start our search by going to Robert Scott's, a well-known private investigator, site known as Black Book Online: www.blackbookonline.info/USA-States.aspx which will take you to this screen.

Next we'll click on Colorado but, as you can see, every state has public records listed.

Clicking on Colorado takes us to the page above. You can see there are all types of "Free" Colorado Records and the same is true for any state you pick. For this exercise we're going to click County Public Records which takes us to the screen below. We'll then click on Property Tax Search

Once we've clicked on that we'll be taken to the El Paso County Assessor's Real Property Search page.

Once on the Assessor's page we'll put the name of the subject we're looking for or their address. For demonstration purposes I randomly typed in the last name Wilson as shown below and clicked on Wilson John L Jr, Wilson Laura M.

As you can see below there is a wealth of information, free information, that the searcher now has at their fingertips.

This type of search is just one of hundreds of different type of searches one can conduct using Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that just costs one time. Professional investigators who've been in the business for awhile, have all types of OSINT they use as well as proprietary databases available only to the profession.

I hope this helps show the possibilities when conducting investigation into a person or property. Please feel free to leave a comment or, if you have a question, shoot me an email at [email protected]

Lee Walters
President
EXCALIBUR Private Investigation
Serving Florida, Colorado, New Mexico and South Carolina
​352.509.8900; 719.208.4088; 505.208.6400; 803.806.7800

About the author. R. Lee Walters is a retired FBI Agent with over 24 years of federal law enforcement experience. He has worked in the private investigation industry for 13+ years. Click here to learn more.