In the past year, hundreds of local agencies across the country that keep records of property sales and ownership have made their databases publicly accessible on the Internet.

For reporters, this means tracking down the owner of a piece of property or doing a basic background search on a person often now can be done using a newsroom computer.

The online databases include property ownership records, usually from alocal taxing or property valuation agency such as a county appraiser?s or assessor's office, and real estate transaction documents, such as sales deeds and mortgage loans, usually from a county recorder's or register's office. In some cases a private company has collected the property data from a public agency and then put it online.

There are a number of Web sites that index the various property recordsdatabases. Among them are:

Webgator

The Webgator site has extensive lists of Web resources for investigators, including links to several hundred county and city agencies that puttheir property records on the Internet. The list is organizedalphabetically by state.

Pacific Information Resources Page

This is an index where you select a state to get a list of the various online public records databases available in that state. At the page for each individual state, scroll down to the sections for county and city public records for links to the property records Web sites.

NETR Online

A private real estate research and information company, NETR has a map of the United States on its Web page that you can click on to bring up a list of all the county agencies in a particular state that track property sales and ownership. Agencies that have Web pages are noted, and, if their property records are available online, that is flagged with a'Go to Data Online! link.

Even if there's no notation that an online database exists, you still should click on the home page link of an agency to see what's available at its Web site. That?s because some counties have only recently put their real estate databases online, and NETR has yet to include thedatabases in its index.

The amount of information available in the property databases varies widely. Some local agencies have put up extensive databases with sophisticated search tools, while others offer only minimal information. And privacy concerns have caused some agencies to pull back from plans toput all their property information online - such as the names of theproperty owners.

The better databases allow you to search by an address to find out whoowns the property and what its assessed value is, and also let you search by the name of a person so see what property he/she owns.

For example, the Web site for the Broward County, Florida, Property Appraiser?s Office lists the name of the property owner, the address of the property and the assessed value for each parcel of land. There?s even a link that calls up a map that shows the property?s location. The database is searchable either by the name of a person or by a street address.

But other counties mask the names of property owners, so you only cansearch by an address to get the assessed value and a description of thatproperty. Thus the Alameda County Assessor?s Office in California only allows searches by street address or a parcel number, and theretrieved data does not include the name of the property owner, just the address and the assessed value of the property.

You also need to be very cautious about how you use these onlineownership/assessment records:

The ownership records, for example, are only updated periodically (often just once a year), so someone listed in the online database as the owner of a piece of property may actually have subsequently sold it and is no longer the owner. Thus you need to make sure you call the listedowner to verify the ownership information is current.

And the assessed value listed for a property often is very different from its actual market value. That's particularly true in California because of restrictions on property assessments that were enacted with the passage of the Jarvis property tax initiative back in 1978.

So check with your local assessor's or appraiser's office first to findout exactly what the assessed value represents before using that numberin a story.

Similar issues exist with the property transaction databases. These databases usually include deeds showing property purchases and mortgage documents, such as the bank loans new property owners obtained to finance the purchases. These property transaction databases are usually searchable by the name of a person.

But the information available online again varies from agency to agency. For example, if you search by the name of a person who sold a piece of property, you'll usually find the date of the transaction and the name of the buyer, but not necessarily the sales price or the address of the property sold. And some databases include mortgage loan information, such as the name of the bank from which the person received a loan, whileothers do not.

There also are differences in how far back the databases go - some include several years of records, while others list only the most recent documents.

An example of a very extensive database is the Contra Costa County Recorder?s Office in California. This Web site has online indexes of recorded property documents, as well as birth and death certificates and business filings. Each is searchableby the name of a person.

The recorded property documents in the database go back four years andinclude property deeds, mortgage loans, liens placed on a piece ofproperty, and so on.

But the property deeds do not show the sales price, and the mortgage loans do not list the amount of the loans. To get that information you'll still need to go to the registrar?s office and look up the actualdocuments.

Despite these limitations, the online databases can be a real time saver - allowing you to do a quick check online to see if any documents exist at county offices in your area. And the online databases usually include the official number for each property document listed, which you then can use to quickly look up a particular record when you go to the assessor'sor recorder's office.

One last tip? property documents can be pretty confusing to the uninitiated. For a good online glossary of real estate terms, try theRealtor.com site.