Purchases and sales: common mistakes and better choices

This site publishes no purchases, no sales and no prices. The reason is short: a transaction record is a location record. To say that a house was bought or sold is to say where the buyer now lives, and once that is said, the description of the building becomes a description of the target. The most interesting things about a house survive the removal of its transactions completely, and the transactions are the only part that does harm.

What this page does instead is explain how property records work, because most of what people believe they show is wrong. A public record is a narrow, dated statement made for a legal or fiscal purpose. Reading it as a fact about a person, a price or a building is the most common mistake in the whole subject.

What to take away

• A recorded deed says that a document was lodged on a date. It does not say who lives in the building, what it is worth, or what condition it is in.
• Assessed value, listed price, agreed price and recorded consideration are four different numbers. They are routinely confused.
• Records exist for the parcel and the building, and used that way they are useful. Used to locate a person they are a weapon, and this site will not point them.

What the records are

Each record was created by a different body for a different reason, and each answers one question only.

The deed or transfer record. Held by a county recorder, registry or equivalent. It shows that an instrument transferring an interest in a parcel was lodged, when, and between which named parties. The names are frequently legal entities: companies, trusts, nominees. The consideration stated is sometimes the price, sometimes a nominal figure, sometimes absent, depending on local practice.

The assessment roll. Held by an assessor or finance department for tax purposes. It carries a value the assessor assigned by a method set in law, a description of the parcel and building, and sometimes a record of permits. The assessed value is produced for taxation and is not a market price. How that value is derived differs by jurisdiction; a city finance department's own explanation of how property assessments are made is the right kind of source for the method where the parcel sits.

Permits and inspections. Held by a building department. These record what was approved to be built or altered, and when. Of all the public records, this is the one that describes the building itself.

Plats, surveys and zoning maps. Held by a planning department or surveyor. They describe the parcel geometry and what may be built on it.

Designation records. Held by a heritage body. They describe what is protected and why, and bind any owner, which is why they are public. What such a status does and does not do is set out at what listing on the National Register means.

What the records do not show

The gap between what a record says and what people read into it is where the mistakes live.

Who lives there. A name on a deed is the holder of a legal interest. It may be a company, a trust, a lender, a relative, or a person who has never set foot in the building. Occupancy is not recorded anywhere public, and inferring it from ownership is a guess presented as a fact.

The price. The recorded consideration may be nominal, may be the price, or may be omitted. Transfer taxes, where they exist, are calculated by rules that do not always track the price paid. A listing price is an asking figure. A reported price is a journalist's reading of one of the above.

The date of the deal. A recording date is when the document reached the registry, which can be weeks after the agreement and sometimes long after.

The building. Nothing in a deed describes the condition, the plan, the materials or the alterations. That information lives in permits, surveys and the fabric itself.

Common mistakes and better choices

Mistake	Why it is wrong	Better choice
Treating assessed value as the price	Assessment is a taxation figure produced by a statutory method	Read the assessor's published method; treat the number as a tax input only
Treating a listing price as a sale	Asking is not agreeing	Ignore listing figures entirely for any factual purpose
Reading a deed name as an occupant	Ownership and occupancy are different things and neither is a fact about who sleeps where	Do not attempt to identify occupants at all
Treating an entity name as concealment	Entities hold property for tax, liability, estate and lending reasons in the ordinary course	Draw no inference from the form of the holder
Using a recording date as a transaction date	Recording lags agreement	Treat the record as a floor on the date, not the date
Building a chain of transactions to reconstruct a person's movements	This is surveillance, whatever the source	Stop. This is the use the site exists to refuse
Reading permits as proof of finished work	A permit is approval, not completion	Look for final inspection or completion records, if the authority keeps them
Assuming records are current	Registries lag and errors persist	Ask the holding body for the current entry

The legitimate use

Records used for the parcel and the building are genuinely valuable, and this site uses them that way.

A permit history tells you when a wing was added, a roof was raised, a wall was removed, and it dates the phases you can see in the fabric, a method described in former homes. A plat tells you the lot geometry that drove the plan, which is the starting point of US homes by city. A zoning map tells you what could be built and therefore why the building is the shape it is. A designation record tells you what is protected and gives a documented description of the architecture. None of those involves a person.

The test for any record is whether the entry you are writing would be unchanged if the occupant changed tomorrow. If it would, you are writing about a building. If it would not, you are writing about a person, and the record is doing something other than architecture.

Why "it is already public" does not settle it

Every record above is public in the sense that a member of the public can obtain it. That is not the same as saying its aggregation is harmless. Records are scattered across bodies, formats and dates, and the effort of assembling them is the practical protection most people have. A page that does the assembling removes the protection, and it does so for every reader at once, including the one reader who should not have it.

That is why the answer here is a rule and not a judgment call. Institutions that open to the public publish their own locations and are treated as institutions. Private houses are described as buildings, without the records that would tie them to anyone. The same rule is applied to houses in dense cities, where the legal forms of ownership are more varied, under New York homes, and to houses on wide lots and hillsides under Los Angeles homes.

Common questions

Are sale prices really not useful for understanding a building?

They tell you what one buyer and one seller agreed on one day, which reflects the lot, the market, the financing and the parties as much as the building. For the building itself, permits and a survey say far more. The reasons a large house costs what it does to build are discussed under mansions, without any figures.

If a name is on a public deed, what is the harm in repeating it?

The deed sits in a registry, indexed by parcel, retrievable by someone who already knows what they are looking for. Repeating it beside a description and a photograph of the house indexes it the other way round, by person, and hands the result to anyone. The information is the same; the act is different.

Do you use records at all?

For buildings, yes: permits, plats, zoning, designation. For people, no. The line is whether the record describes the parcel or the party.

What should I do if I want to know the history of a house I am buying?

Ask the registry for the chain of title, the building department for the permit history, the planning department for zoning and any protection, and a surveyor for the condition. Those are your questions to ask about your own transaction, and the bodies that hold the records will answer them.