If you want to know the value of your home -- at least as it is assessed by your local government -- the odds of finding such information online have become increasingly good.

While tax assessment values and market values often differ, tax assessments are important. They are the benchmark which is used to establish your property taxes, perhaps thousands of dollars each year.

Why do assessments and market values differ?

Market values -- the price of homes for sale now -- are instant and immediate. Assessments reflect home evaluations made every two or three years in most jurisdictions. Moreover, assessments may be limited by such things as annual caps and special provisions for seniors, veterans, and others.

The Internet makes public records research a breeze. One of the best places to find property records is the site operated by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

This is not just a site for property owners in Virginia. Instead, it offers links to property record sites nationwide -- and Canada!

If you own property and pay taxes, this site can be very useful if your public data is digitized and available through your county or city's Web sites. Created by UVA student Angela Vaughan, the site is currently maintained by fellow student Susan Rider.

The front page of the Property Assessments Online (PAO) first offers links to the various regions of the country. For instance, The South link gives you access to online assessments from 231 jurisdictions spread throughout Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Once you click the link, you're taken to a long page (I would suggest creating these pages in a columnar format for even easier navigation) with states listed and their locales linked. From there, you can check out whatever it is your tax assessor's office has deemed pertinent enough to place online, assuming, of course, that your hometown has made digitizing of your land records a priority.

In my own backyard -- Fairfax County, Virginia -- not only did I find my current assessed value, but also the last two transactions of my property, acreage of the lot, house description, comparable sales used to determine the assessed value of my house, a parcel map of my neighborhood, along with an aerial view of the whole community with my property highlighted in yellow.

Amazing. Scary, but amazing. While I like having access to the PAO -- so does anyone else in the world -- not just my address, taxes, names, etc., but now satellite photos of my roof line, albeit from thousands of miles away.

If you don't find your jurisdiction available at UVA's site, then click on over to Appraisers.com, a commercial site that has 3,200 pages -- including a page with local appraisers for every county in the U.S.

This one is high on graphics and ease of navigation, mainly directing surfers to its paid-listing directory for appraisers. Click a state, click a region, click a county and you are then presented with a directory of appraisers using the site.

M. Anthony Carr is a Washington-based author who has written about real estate issues for more than a decade.

Published: May 11, 2001

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Mr. Carr is an award-winning real estate broker in Northern Virginia and authored "Real Estate Investing Made Simple: a commonsense approach to building wealth." He also contributed to Donald Trump’s book, "The Best Real Estate Advice I Ever Received," and is an active trainer and coach of top producers in the Washington DC market. As a sought-after expert on real estate, Mr. Carr has been featured on CNN, various broadcast outlets and was the former real estate editor for The Washington Times. He accepts questions at his blog www.RealEstateOlogy.org.