Permission - The Prequel, Finding Properties With Public Records Data.

One of my first articles I posted on The Whitetail Detail I discussed landing permission (you can find that here). I talked through tactics and approaches to getting permission, maintaining permission, and tried to check every box on the list when it came to finding private land to hunt on. This article is a technical article focused on finding those places. You need to know where you are asking to hunt before you go ask. It always helps to know as much information as possible like owners names, is it a trustee, is the ownership filed under an LLC and more. The purpose of this article is to walk through how I find all of that information. We all know that there are apps out there that provide a lot of this information and those apps help a lot of people. I have the advantage that I worked in mapping directly out of college and have a degree in geospatial information systems. What does that mean exactly? That means before all of these apps were big names providing this information service to hunters, I was utilizing free online public record maps and information, a strategy that I continue to utilize today. Nothing against the apps at all, they work great and occasionally I find myself asking my buddies who have the apps if they can look up a property for me real quick. But, for 99% of my property scouting I utilize the free information out there.

To begin, here is a short list of what I use to in my property finding strategy:

-Google Earth (its free to download and pretty awesome as you will see)

-Obviously a computer but I have found having a mouse or trackpad that functions exactly the same way as a 2 button mouse is extremely useful. I will admit this strategy is somewhat of a pain on a MacBook without a mouse.

That's it!

Next I want to go over some pros and cons of the free public info vs hunting property apps.

This is based off my experience

Free Online Resources:

Pros

● Its free

● You can find historical data easily

○ When did the property last sell/ How long has the current owner owned it

○ Has it jumped family members/a variety of LLCs?

● You can determine if there are live in structures relatively easily

● You can determine if the property owner actually lives there relatively easily

● You can “puzzle piece” properties together (Ill elaborate on this later).

● There is a lot of ways to utilize google earth that are overlooked

Cons

● It does take a little capability to google research, but usually nothing too terrible

● It can take a bit to develop a system, but once you have one down its relatively seamless and efficient from there.

● The biggest would be that the Public GIS Property maps are all different. While some are extremely intuitive and pretty much load and click, others can be testing at times.

● You need to be prepared going out, you can't just pull it up on your phone.

Apps

Pros

● They are pretty fast and usable on the go

● They are intuitive and don't really have much of a learning curve

● They have unique options that may not be possible or as easy to create through google earth

Cons

● They cost money or do have a limited free version

● Information can be tiered based on fees

● You can be limited to options like available imagery or owner information

○ For example an app may just tell you so and so LLC owns this but you may not be provided information beyond that

● There are many apps all offering their own options

At the end of the day, I am sure there are more pros and cons to these options. But, the best pro of all is there is no requirement to choose one over the other. As I mentioned earlier, while I mainly rely on the free public options, I still utilize the apps occasionally. There's no reason your overall approach can’t be a mixed bag approach. At the very least, as I will show further into this article I would strongly suggest utilizing Google Earth and the benefits it can provide.

From this point on the article will walk through a standard property owner information search i go through. I will attempt to cover as many scenarios and situations as possible, but as mentioned earlier due to the variety and differences you may come across when using public information, there may always be something new you have to figure out.

I live and hunt in Montgomery County Ohio, because of this I will utilize Montgomery County and surrounding counties systems and information.

Begin by simply google searching your county follow by “GIS Map” In the vast majority of cases, it is beneficial to include the state as well considering there are many counties with the same names across states. For example, I used to live in Clark County Ohio. Las Vegas, Nevada is also in Clark County. Which do you think is the more popular result if you just google search “Clark County Public Info”?

Here we see that it comes up as the first result, pretty simple. There are occasions where it may not, but that is usually pretty rare.

Another important note, public information and the amount of effort put into the website is usually a factor of the county revenue. I have found in rural and high poverty counties, the site may be more “clunky” I guess to say.

Selecting the GIS | Montgomery County, OH result takes us to the home page. You are going to want to find the “GIS Map”, “parcel Map”, or something similar to that.

From here this takes you to the Montgomery County GIS Public Information Map. This map in particular is one of the less intuitive ones, therefore it's a good one to learn on.

I am going to zoom into a property where I do have permission and I utilized this strategy to find the property owners info.

As you can see, the display changes as you zoom in and out. This is a common features that allow for faster loading as you would not want to try and load all of the roads in an entire county. If you do not see the info you want immediately, try zooming in and out and see if the display changes.

I do know for this particular county, imagery will not show up unless you turn it on.

First I select Layers in the top left corner.

I select Aerial Imagery and as you can see in the background, the imagery turns on.

I see a property I may interested in so I zoom in on it and want to find out some info.

For this website in particular I must first select “Parcels” (back up at the top of the layer list) and then the information button.

Now I simply select the property and the public information displays. I select the link to the records and it provides me with all the data in a new window

With this one, we see it is owned by “Flying Anvil LLC” with the mailing address not being the property address. In this case, the mailing address is relatively close. I have experienced situations where mailing addresses have been in completely different states. This is extremely beneficial information that helped me tremendously and landed me one of my best properties ever.

I notate the information and continue my search around to gather information for more properties. I see one across the street so I do the same thing.

In this case, here we see the property owner name is different but the mailing address is the same. This helps me because now I know I can go to one source and if I get permission the likelihood that they own both these properties, or at least someone in the family, is high.

This tactic did work for me as I do have permission on all of the property plus a little more from this owner. This is why I stated that “puzzle piecing” properties together can be easier and beneficial utilizing public records. Any app that I have ever experienced using would've told me the poverty owners name and I would have assumed that they were not the same person.

Now I want to look at the property on Google Earth.

If you google search google earth you can find the download for it for free.

When you open it, its pretty simple, its google earth.

Now I will zoom into the property.

I will walk through some features you can utilize with google earth.

The first one is historical view, you can se all the historical satellite imagery to your advantage. You can see trails in the winter time, see what crops were planted over the years, and more. Here we can see an old farm house that was at one time used and maintained but is now forgotten and falling over.

Select the clock at the top and it will put you in historical imagery mode. When you select it, it always puts it at todays date. The image seen here is not from 9/2023. I have to go “back one” using the left arrow to see when the latest picture was captured.

Here we see the date changed to 7/22 so the last imager was captured in July of 2022.

Lets keep going back. Here we see 6 years prior the imagery captured shows the property around the dilapidated house was more frequently maintained.

Out of curiosity, lets see how far back it goes.

Here we see it goes back to 1994, today's roads are still shown but as you can see at that time it was nothing but farmland.

Another advantage of google earth is google street view. Let's look at this property from the road.

To get the most up to date road imagery, first you want to go to the web. You can do ti directly in google earth, but road imagery is updated very frequently and sometimes the most up to date imagery from the road is not uploaded to google earth updates as frequently. Start by selecting the circled icon at the top.

This will take you to the web directly to the same location.

Select the little person in the bottom right and drop him on the road. Occasionally in extremely rural areas this may not be an option or you may only be able to get close from a nearby state route or main road.

Using the mouse you can move up and down the street and you can see when the imagery was taken (Highlighted in yellow at the bottom near the right corner).

You can even look at historical street view.

Here we see a range of dates at the bottom populate so we can view the property frmo the street as far back as 2007.

One more thing that I use google earth for is outlining and managing my properties and hunting supplies. This can be done utilizing the pin drop and polygon tools directly in google earth. THIS IS NOT ON GOOGLE MAPS ONLINE WHERE I LOOK AT STREET VIEW.

(Yes I know I spelled Moultrie two different ways) *Insert facepalm*

Looking around I see another property down the street I am interested in. Lets take a look at that.

Here you can see that additional property I have permission on as well as a few properties to the east that I tried to get permission on but was told no.

Lets look at one more great feature from google earth. When you hold down the center scroll button and drag, you can look at the surface from an angle. Here it look like maybe there's some topography in that wooded area.

I go back to the overhead view and use the path tool (up next the point drop and polygon tool I mentioned earlier) to draw a line through it.

I name it path "through the center" and select ok.

I find this layer on the left side of my screen, right select it, and select "show elevation profile" near the bottom of the list of options.

As I move my mouse back and forth across the elevation profile an arrow appears showing me where along that path I am looking at. This is an awesome option when trying to determine topographic features and variety in heavily wooded areas like the one shown.

Lets look at this property on the public records map.

I search Greene County Ohio GIS Map

Here we see like before it comes right up. Greene county has one the best GIS map services I have ever used. As you will see, selecting the link takes you directly to the map and there is no manipulation or settings that you have to change to start finding property info.

I zoom into the property and just select it. No setting changes, no need to turn on imagery, nothing at all. Plus, unlike Montgomery Counties website, this one displays a good amount of info immediately. There is no need to follow a link or open a new page.

That pretty much wraps up how I find properties utilizing public information. From here there may be some general google searching that may need done. When i found the property in Ohio owned by someone in Georgia I simply googled “Owners Name” followed by the city his mailing address was in in Georgia. From there I found a guy with the same name and a Dayton Ohio Area code and the same address as the mailing address. I just called him.

When it comes to finding info from a property that is owned by an LLC, I just search the mailing address of the property in the public records search. Usually that at the very least will help me determine if the mailing address comes back to a house. If it does I either go to the house or begin google searching for a phone number. If the mailing address is a P.O. box and the property is owned by an LLC google search the LLC. That often will bring up information about the LLC that will show the business address as a P.O. box and then a separate mailing address for the LLC that is the owner's house.

As we have all heard before, there are many ways to skin a cat. I hope that through all of this you can at the least take something and add it to your hunting strategy. I believe that Google Earth is an absolute essential, regardless if you're going with the free public info approach or the app approach. If you want to try this tactic out yourself and are struggling or can't overcome some one-off issue not mentioned, feel free to message me through Instagram and I would be more than happy to help!