In recent years Google mapping software has given us (technologically advanced) tax sale investors a huge advantage. In this video we discuss how to use Google Street View and explain why it’s such an asset to have in your toolbox as a tax sale investor.

Transcript:

Hey, everybody! It’s Casey Denman here with TaxSaleAcademy.com. In this video, we’re going to be discussing using one of the most powerful and innovative mapping tools for your tax sale research. And that is none other than Google Street View. Now, if you’ve never used Google Street View before, you are seriously missing out on a huge, huge tool that you have at your disposal that’s free for doing your tax sale research.

Before I explain what it is, let me show you a picture. This is a picture of what’s called a “Google Street View car.” You’ll see it’s a car and it has some sort of crazy-looking instrument mounted on the roof. This is actually a vehicle that travels up and down the streets of America, and using that crazy instrument, it takes 360° photos as it drives along. It transmits those photos, along with GPS points, back to Google, who in turn intertwines those photos with their Google mapping software. And let give you an example of this and show you how it works.

So right now we’re on the website, Google.com. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to search for an address. The address is 2204 NW Harvard Walk in Bentonville, Arkansas. Now this is not a tax sale property. It’s just an address that I pulled off the Internet. It’s actually a house that’s for sale right now. So the address itself should mean nothing to you, but it will serve as an example of what we’re about to show you.

Let’s click “search.” It will pull up a bunch of information. At the very top, it will show us the Google Maps. Let’s click on that. Now, as you can see, it pulls up an aerial view. I’ve done videos in the past about both Google aerial views and Bing aerial views and how powerful those tools are and how they can benefit you. If you haven’t viewed those videos yet, certainly consider taking the time to do so.

What you’ll see here is in the center of the screen, we have the letter A with the marker to it. And on the top left, we also have the letter A and it’s next to our address. Now, obviously, you kind of figure this out by common sense. The A here and the A here matches. So you have the address and it matches the aerial view here. And we can zoom in, and it actually shows us right in front of this particular house.

Now, before we get too far, let me explain something to you really quick. Google Street View cars do not drive every street in the country. There are gated communities they don’t have access to, there are rural communities they haven’t been to yet and there are roads that they have just forgotten to drive down. So, what you can do is you can click on this little stick figure here. You click on it and hold the mouse button down. Drag it off of there ,and any road that is highlighted in blue has been imaged.

Now, let’s scroll down a little bit and I’ll show you some roads that you cannot access. We’ll click on the guy again, drag him off, and you have all these roads in blue, but in the center of the screen here, you have these roads that are still in gray. They did not yet highlight it with blue, which means that it is not possible for you to drop your little guy there to see what it actually looks like.
So let’s drop him back where he belongs. We’ll scroll back to our letter A which indicates the house that we’re interested in. We’ll zoom in a little bit here. And now we have an aerial view. So let’s take our guy. We’ll drag him right in front of this house and you’ll see that you’re going to have a green marker right below your stick figure. At the bottom of the green marker is kind of a point on the end of it. This is if somebody drops you in the center of that road, where that point is facing is where you will face. So right now, it’s kind of pointed southwest. And right now, it’s kind of pointed west. So it’s pointed north now. And now it’s pointed just about at the house. So we’re going to let go. We’re going to drop the guy there and it’s going to load us as if we were standing directly in front of this house.

Now here’s the picture of the house. Obviously, they have a very nice house. But what this does is it allows you to see a picture of the house without having to fly there or without paying somebody to do this for you. It’s a huge, huge tool to have in your toolbox. Now on the bottom left here, you’ll see the image date. It says “January 2008.” So obviously, it’s a few years old, but it should serve as an idea of how the condition is of the particular property and of the area.

So let’s scroll down. Now you can use these little arrows here. If you click them, it helps navigate you up and down the streets. So we’ll continue to click them here. And luckily for us, on this particular piece of property, it’s a corner lot, so we can down a side street. And in this case, we can look at the backyard and a picture of the side of the house. So it’s a very beneficial tool. We not only see the front, we can also see the side.

So let’s scroll back out here to the main road and we get on the main road. Now, if you notice, when you click these little buttons just one at a time, it takes you one segment or just 15 or 20 feet at a time. You can also click way out here beyond the arrow. You’re able to click here. It’ll zoom you, it’ll take you exactly to that spot. This is beneficial if you want to know what the area looks like if you’re driving into a particular subdivision or you’re driving in a particular neighborhood.

So we can continue to keep clicking forward and we’ll see, obviously, this is a very, very nice subdivision. And when you’re all done and you want to go back to the house that you came from, you can click on the top left on this photo up here below our address and it will pull up this. And here we are, we’re back at this particular house.

If you get disoriented and you click around too much and you don’t understand where you’re at on a map, on the bottom right hand corner, you can click this arrow and expand this. Then you can compare where you’re at. You can even zoom out here. You can compare where you’re at to what you’re actually seeing. And you’ll see as I turn my photo, this guy and the point ahead of him, the direction that he’s facing, will also turn down here.

So, as you can see, it’s a very, very helpful feature and it can end up saving you a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of headache in the future if you’re able to learn how to properly use the Google Street View feature.

For more information on researching tax sale properties and the very lucrative tax sale business, head on over to TaxSaleAcademy.com. And while you’re there, download your free copy of The Tax Sale Blueprint. Have a great day!