Help! CPAs/Realtors

You need to find your paperwork for the property........each plot (piece of land) has a name.........like Irvington lot 100....or something. If you don't know where your paperwork is, then go to your assessors office in town..........or even the Treasurer's office...........ask for the "legal" name of your property at such and such an address. They should be able to tell you, if you would like the whole place since you said it was a farm, you may have to have the assessor recommend to you how to get that............if the farm is paid for, it will be in your legal title work when the house was bought or the mortgage was taken out.......

Good luck..........either of those offices should be able to help you at your county courthouse. Take care.

There is usually a "legal description" which is the plot #, acres, that sort of thing. If you look on your deed it will list what the "legal description" of the property as well as the normal street address, the "otherwise known as".

For FMV it's what a typical buyer can expect to pay for a property such as the one described. To get a valuation on land from a few years ago you'll need to contact a qualified appraiser.

Fair Market Value is what a piece would sell for today if placed on the market. This is not the same as the assessed value on the tax bill! Usually FMV is determined by comperable property sales in the same geographic region. To get the FMV from 2006, you'd have to research sales of similar properties in your area that occured in 2006. This information is available at your local Clerk of Court.

http://www.gsccca.org/Search/RealEstate/namesearch.asp

You can try this, maybe you'll find it. Properties don't usually have names, but they will be required to have a legal description (e.g. lot 40 Savannah Point Subdivision). They will also reference a plat and sometimes list the actual metes and bounds description (e.g. "starting at an iron pin at the corner of lots 40 and 41, thence running 265.4 feet blah blah blah"). Real property information is recorded in a Register of Deeds or Recorder of Deeds. Absent one of these the info will be in a Clerk of Court. These are county departments and you will only be able to find it online if your county has put them online. If you have to actually talk to someone in these departments, they may not be willing to help you. It's not because they're rude, though, it's because it's not their responsibility to help you find things. You unfortunately have to figure it out yourself or ask someone lingering around the books.

Many counties don't bother with fair market value and instead only worry about tax value. My county does both, but they are almost always the exact same thing, and they are always significantly less than what you would expect to pay on an ACTUAL "fair market". The tax assessor in your county would be able to answer these questions, and they probably actually will. If you try to find it online, you may be able to figure it out by searching for your past tax bills or even looking for them in your files at home- SOME of them will list the tax value of the home. Keep in mind, though, that the county's version of "fair market value" or "tax value" is not necessarily in line with reality.

I hope that helps some. I'm much more familiar with my own state and county, but the concepts are roughly the same around the country.