A property abstract is a collection of legal documents which chronicles activities associated with a particular parcel of land. Generally included are references to deeds, mortgages, wills, probate records, court litigations and tax sales. Basically, any essential legal documents that affect the property. The abstract will also show the names of all property owners and how long a particular holder owned it for as well as showing the price the land was exchanged for when it changed owners. Rarely an abstract will mention capital improvements to the property. Property abstracts are considered good starting places for research on historical buildings.
Read more about Property Abstract: Abstract of Title
Famous quotes containing the words property and/or abstract:
“By avarice and selfishness, and a groveling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Rights! There are no rights whatever without corresponding duties. Look at the history of the growth of our constitution, and you will see that our ancestors never upon any occasion stated, as a ground for claiming any of their privileges, an abstract right inherent in themselves; you will nowhere in our parliamentary records find the miserable sophism of the Rights of Man.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)