After seeing all those little signs hammered into people's front yards advertising for local politicians I never heard of, I decided to do a little look-see on the internet. I ended up on the county website and got sidetracked.
The county has this new feature where you can look up property assessments. This does not mean only lists of prices. There are details about everything on a property. For instance, if you search for an address, not only do you get who owns the property and what it's currently worth, but everything else. If there's a house on the property, there are even details about the roofing materials and the quality of the cabinetry included. So it's not just the realtors who can find out how many plumbing fixtures are in your house but pretty much any random stranger.
Speaking of campaign signs, I remember Bill Boner running for Nashville mayor. My uncle supported him and had Boner stuff all over my grandmother's house.
We've had this for years. Then again, local law specifies that information of this sort is part of the public record, so it's no big surprise. Sites like zillow.com even tap the assessment lists to compute their estimated values.
Yup, it's all public information, even how much you paid for your house. And your property taxes are public record, too. My county's web site allows you to search for both by name and street info. We even have a site that will show you a map and a satellite picture of every place in the county, like google maps.
When I was in college, one of my summer jobs was entering the county's voter records into a database (they were finally going digital), and I noticed that 95% of the people were registered republican. I asked my mom (who also worked for the county) why that was. It was because we were the state capitol, and republicans were the majority. They would call the voter records and find out how you were registered before you got a job. If you were registered as anything other than republican (even independant was considered bad), you didn't get a government job.
About the only thing they can't publish is your social security number.
