Question about vacant space.
I am not sure if this is the right place to ask this sort of thing... but I figured that I would give it a shot.

There is a [garage/mechanic shop](http://imgur.com/mXFxo6e) in my town that has been sitting there unused for well over a decade. It has one bay and possibly an office area. I've never seen anyone in there and there are cinderblocks  situated at the entrance so that people don't park there (not present when the picture was taken). There is a giant pole where a sign used to hang so it was once used commercially.

I haven't walked up to the door to see if it is completely unused. For all I know, Someone may be using it as storage or something. It might be part of someones residential property because it appears as though a house situated behind it, set back from the road (barely visible through the trees in the image). There is no apparent driveway to the house. There are currently no "For Sale" or "For Rent" signs. I don't think it is condemned or anything like that. All of the windows are intact and the roof looks fairly new. The grass and surrounding area is well maintained.

I have a sign business that I currently run out of my house. It is growing and I think that this would be a great spot to finally have a storefront. All of the mechanics that I know don't like a shop with one bay because, if they have to take a car apart and don't have the necessary part to put it back together, it can drastically slow down productivity. This may be why it is vacant, who knows. One bay would be perfect for me. I would need it from time to time to do vehicle lettering, and it would be great for getting larger signs in and out of the door.

How do I go about finding out if it is something that I can rent or purchase? With no signs indicating that it is for sale or for rent, I don't know where to start. Is it taboo/illegal to walk up and peer inside the windows? I can ask the pizza shop located next door to see what they know, but I just thought about this location today and figured I'd start with reddit.
[{"id": "d49zw1q", "text": "Look up the property with the city or county.  You can do a search for \"city state GIS\". You should be able to see the property card and find the owner, as well as when they bought it and how much that paid, what the assessed value is, etc. (You can also see if the house behind the shop is a separate parcel and/or owner, too.)\n\nThen you pick up the phone and see if they'd be willing to talk about it with you.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}, {"id": "d4a2evw", "text": "Go to tax assessor's office and look at the tax map. Find the lot and you can tell if it's connected to a residential property. Write down the block and lot. Then walk over to the clerk's office and look up property owners info by block and lot. It won't give you a phone number but you'll get a mailing address. Hopefully the mailing address is not the property address. Send them a letter or if it's in an individual's name, look them up on white pages.com. ", "replies": [{"id": "d4a504n", "text": "&gt; Hopefully the mailing address is not the property address.\n\nIf it is, or really this is good to check anyways, search the owner's name.  Lots of time you hit their primary residence pretty easy by doing so.", "replies": [{"id": "d4adpdz", "text": "Yeah but a lot of commercial is owned by an llc so if the address is the property, you're stuck. ", "replies": [{"id": "d4afaz5", "text": "Not if you run a search for the llc's mailing address for other properties  linked to that mailing address. Typically you will find a single family residence (owner's mansion) and then you can identify the individual.", "replies": [], "depth": 4}, {"id": "d4appr8", "text": "Not always, llc's are registered with the state and almost always have a manager &amp; address listed (depending on your state). Though, if it's an attorney's office you may be stuck.", "replies": [{"id": "d4boxrk", "text": "I've gotten lucky a couple times with two different things when I run into the dreaded attorney agent llc problem if it helps anyone.  If your auditor has conveyance documents, tax appeal forms, or rental registrations online a lot of times those will be signed by the true owner.  The second is going through the past filings of the LLC (again assuming your stats SOS makes these easy to get at).  Maybe its an attorney agent now but lots of times it wasn't always like that or someone signed to appoint the current agent, which is typically the true owner or their last attorney (if its the last attorney obviously this isn't very helpful)", "replies": [{"id": "d4btj2z", "text": "That's good. Also if you look at the actual scans of the mortgage if it's been recorded with the county, the real buyer often signed the docs and you can find that info there.", "replies": [], "depth": 6}], "depth": 5}], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}, {"id": "d4al313", "text": "&gt; Find the lot and you can tell if it's connected to a residential property. Write down the block and lot. Then walk over to the clerk's office and look up property owners info by block and lot. It won't give you a phone number but you'll get a mailing address. Hopefully the mailing address is not the property address. Send them a letter or if it's in an individual's name, look them up on white pages.com.  \n\nthis sounds like it is very specific for California, the process isn't as convoluted in many other parts of the country. ", "replies": [{"id": "d4al614", "text": "I have no idea what the process is in California. This is what I do in NJ in towns that don't have their tax records online. ", "replies": [{"id": "d4aldlo", "text": "California you have to go back and forth between tax office / assessors office to put together information, although they use parcel number now that I think about it.  \nmost of the country (at least the top 100 metros) include all the information as public outside of CA. The northeast is a different beast though...\n", "replies": [], "depth": 4}], "depth": 3}], "depth": 2}], "depth": 1}, {"id": "d4ddooi", "text": "There are some good ideas here - you could also contact a commercial broker and ask if they know anything about it. That could help get it leased too since they would know going rates and things like that.", "replies": [], "depth": 1}]