>>1759958Finding things out in the countryside for rurex can be more exhausting. For that, you might want to pull up a free topographical maps website like Topozone, which will have little icons marking things like tunnels and old mines, as well as textures showing dredge tailings, quarries, etc. It also uses little pink or black dots to show where structures are. Say, for example, you're looking in some forested foothills or canyons and there's some roads winding through them, and you're curious as to whether there's some structures you can't see through the tree cover. Pull up Topozone, match it to where you're looking on satellite imagery, and see if there's any of those little dots indicating a manmade structure.
When you do find a property that looks abandoned, see if your county has a free online property assessment map tool that shows property lines. You can click on the property the structure you're interested in sits on and pull up parcel information (or, you may just get the parcel ID number, which you can plug into a parcel info program). You might glean something from this, like its exact street address or the owner's name. If you have the street address, you might try searching for it on a real estate website like Zillow, which could potentially yield more information—for example, whether the property is on or off the market. Also, on sites like Zillow, you can specify the area you're looking and and enter keywords like 'abandoned' in the search bar, and see what comes up based on property descriptions. You could also look for public records on things like upcoming city projects, demolition company contract bids, or published EPA cleanup lists.
The rest of my stuff I've found is through word of mouth. Find friends who are interested in urbex; a guy may know a guy who could turn you on to something cool.
Last but not least, just getting out in your car and driving around is the most 'urban explorer' way to look for locations. Good luck Anon.
