Jersey City Online Tools Post 1: Tax Assessment records

[Namit S.]

Post 1: Looking up Tax Assessment Records / Tax Records

This tool is pretty handy and most experience investors in NJ know about it, but some beginners might find it helpful so I'll start with this one. Before I bookmarked it, I always used to google: "tax monmouth" to find the link.

If you are looking to find out more about a property in Jersey City you can look up Tax Assessment Records for a particular property using the Tax Assessment Records maintained here:

Jersey City Assessment Records Search (monmouth.nj.us)

The records for all counties in NJ are available via the New Jersey Association of County Tax Boards website 

NJACTB – Welcome to the official website of the New Jersey County Tax Boards Association

and then click the Menu and click Record Search.

In the first link, I have hardcoded the district to be 0906 which will take you directly to Jersey City, so I recommend bookmarking the first url. 

Let us take a look at one property, 280 Grove Street (City Hall) 

280 Grove Street Property Detail (monmouth.nj.us) 

Starting from Top left to right, you will see:

1st column - Block, Lot - these are handy when you want to pay taxes, look up other information

2nd column - Property Location, District, Property Class - location self explanatory, district 0906 (which is why the first url I had put 0906), class tells you what type of property it is. 15C. You can look up Property Classes here. 15C means Public Property. 

3rd / 4th column - these should be self explanatory.

Moving to the Additional Information block:

I find: 

Map Page (2nd column), Land Desc, Bldg Desc, Acreage (3rd column), Taxes (4th column) to be most useful.

Bldg Desc can get trickey as some of these are old but Jersey City has tried to keep these updated.

You can refer this link here or here on trying to make sense of the Bldg Descriptions. The 2nd column Building Descriptions has the key.

For houses, you might see things like 3S-B+F-2U-H : 3 storey, Brick + Frame, 2 Units, H? 

Sale Section

Being a public property, 280 Grove St doesn't have anything but for a house, the sale section tells you the most recent sale. 

Then the section below, tells you the recent transactions, you can click into them and find out a bit more.

Tax Section

Finally at the bottom you can get a glimpse at the taxes assessed for the past few years.

Hopefully this has been a useful post and if folks find it useful. I will add a few more online tools that I find useful in this series of posts.

Experienced investors in Jersey City are welcome to comment / correct my post. I have always wondered why all of NJ's tax assessment records are available via the Monmouth county url and not some other "common" url. Would love to learn the history behind it.