Welcome to the County Real Estate Web (CREW) portal. CREW is a voluntary, joint project of the four state associations of Assessors, Auditors, Recorders, and Treasurers to provide “one-stop shopping” access to Iowa real estate information. CREW will allow visitors to perform individual county, multi-county, or statewide searches and to view information on specific real estate parcels. It will also provide links to local county websites for more detailed real estate information, when such websites are available.

On July 1, 2009, CREW was opened to the public. Property tax information is available from all ninety-nine County Treasurers, as well as links to Treasurers’ online payment systems. Data from County Auditors, including current ownership, taxable values, site addresses, administrative real estate descriptions, tax and TIF districts, and property classes, is available in eighty-five counties at this time. We expect dynamic links to local Assessors’ property assessment information and to County Recorders’ documents to be available in the future.

There are limitations to the data that will affect your ability to search, and you may receive an error message or disclaimer. One major limitation is the lack of standardization in the storage and formatting of the information. Different counties (and even different offices within the same county) may handle data in different ways. For example, searching for the name “McDaniel” may or may not be successful, depending on whether the individual counties and offices store the name as “MCDANIEL”, or “MC DANIEL”. In this case, you may need to give some thought to how the data might be stored and try various approaches.

Many Iowa counties, or an office within a county, will have real estate information available on their independent websites. CREW is not intended to replace those websites, and will generally not include as much detail on a specific real estate parcel. What CREW can do is search for and integrate information from the several offices within the same county, as well as perform multi-county searches. One example of where this could be useful is when you know a site address for a property, but do not know in which county the property lies. Another example is when you know the new owner of a property, but cannot find it in the County Treasurer’s records, because your treasurer does not update ownership information once taxes are certified by the County Auditor. A final example is when your County Auditor does not have real estate information on an independent website, but has made it available to CREW.

CREW is intended to increase access to public records and real estate information from the county offices. However, the information returned and displayed by CREW is not guaranteed or warranted in any way, and the original information in an individual county office will always be the official record.

If you have a question or a problem concerning CREW, please use the “Contact Us” button. CREW was built for you, and we are interested in your feedback.