I am on the other side of the country in Pa. Thats a Steiger Bearcat made for Allis and the big old ones like that dont sell too well, have seen similar go for from 1500 to 3500 depending on condition and rebuilds. Might be a good idea to put in the hands of a dealer on a commission sale? They have to be pretty square on the deals, at least around here they are.

Funny but in the 1980's I was buying my Volvos in Canada and bringing them to the states. I got about a 35% exchange on my money, a bigger discount from the dealer in Canada and got refunded the manufacturing tax that was supposedly included in the sticker price of the Canadian car. I paid no sales tax or value added tax, but had to pay the US State sales tax. I paid a tariff of 2% or about $280 per car. If I had bought a US brand car manufactured in Canada, there would be no tariff. The funny thing is I was getting such a deal on the cars that a few times I sold the car in the US at one year old for more than I paid for it new. So, for a few years I had a new car for no more out of pocket funds. The New England volvo dealers put pressure on Canadian Volvo and thereafter they would no longer put the proper EPA and DOT stickers on the cars so they couldn't be imported by individuals. The warranties were good in either country. In fact if you read most vehicle warranties it says that they are good in the US or Canada. My US Volvo dealer told me to bring the car in anytime for warranty work and they would treat me the same as if I had purchased the car from them. They always did....no waiting and no fuss.

Columbusguy, our county auditor also has a website with similar information. Unfortunately it only goes back to the 1950s, so my house was already 50 years old by then. I had to go to the courthouse and look at the deed/title record to go back to the beginning. Another house was on our lot previously, so it was a little hard to date the house exactly based on that alone. Like you, we are also on a corner lot. The house next door is exactly the same as ours and built by the same family - the daughter (married to the owner of the company that made the bricks for the two houses) lived in the house next door, and the son lived in this house. Their parents lived across the street! I love my family, but I think that would have been too much family togetherness for me! And every so often I feel unreasonably upset that they split the lot in two (our house is technically on a half-lot). How dare they build two houses without considering ME?! PS: I love driving through the old Columbus neighborhoods to see the houses and other architecture. I watch the Columbus Neighborhoods show on PBS whenever they show it just to see the buildings! Brickeyee, I had my title search done by a title insurance company. I would not use them again or trust them to do anything related to my house ever again. After several serious mistakes (like my name not being on the title transfer paperwork) I noticed a typo on the title (which reads "South" instead of "Fourth," and they refused to fix it "without hiring a surveyor to re-survey the property." In doing my research, I had copies of the previous titles - transferred by them the past 2 sales. Their spellcheck had corrected the previous title's typo of "Sourth" to "South" instead of "Fourth." She tried to tell me that the street names could have changed over the years so they couldn't fix the title. Yeah, lady, it makes perfect sense to go Second, Third, South, Fifth, Sixth Street. Now I thought the purpose of title insurance was to guarantee the accuracy of the title. It's just money down a rat hole.

anglo, your description of how your assessed value compares to comparable sales in your neighborhood is quite different in my state. California's Proposition 13, passed in the late 1970s, is intended to limit property tax increases for long term owners, and to do so it results in a measure of unfairness of taxation between new versus long term owners. When property is purchased, its value is adjusted to the transaction price. The annual property tax charge at that point and thereafter is limited to 1% of value (though in practice it can be a slight bit higher). Annual increases in assessed valuation (and therefore in the tax bill) from one year to the next is limited to 2% per year. Needless to say, the sustained real estate valuation increases over past years and decades in much of the populated areas has been greater than 2% per year. In the case of two identical properties side by side, a new owner could easily be paying 3 or 4 times as much, or more in annual taxes compared to a long term owner of an identical property next door. When the few downturns occurred, the tax valuations for newer buyers (the only ones with properties at or near fair value for tax purposes) were mostly adjusted downwards. Sometimes grudgingly -valuations are done county by county and some were a bit more enlightened on their own than others.