A hunch, some digging through records, and a big margin

[John R Kepler]

Ran across a listing of two homes on one lot. Both in rough shape, one rented and one vacant. My hunch was that this lot could be subdivided and the homes rehabbed and sold separately. A few visits to city planning and the court house confirmed my hunch. I was told others had looked but apparently none dug as deep as I did. It turns out there were no recent surveys and that is where most quit. I noticed in the tax records that each home had it's own tax account and one had a plat reference the other the same with a suffix. GIS mapping had the lot outlined as two lots but no data available for that area. There were no deeds to be found in free public records.  My realtor was able to find 3 plat/page references in the brokers paid data account. I went back to the records and found a survey from 1956. The deeds of each sale were for investors buying the lots as a package. However each deed referred back to the 1956 survey of two separate lots.  I was now confident to make an offer below an already low price. It was accepted this afternoon. The one rented property supports the purchase as is. Everything from over and above will be bonus.