Purchases and sales records: a deed, a roll and a permit compared

This site publishes no purchases, no sales and no prices. A transaction record is a location record. Saying a house was bought or sold says where the buyer now lives, and the building description then becomes a description of the target.

The most interesting things about a house survive removing its transactions. The transactions are the only part that does harm.

Purchases and sales records are the subject here, narrowed to three types that get compared below: a recorded deed, an assessment roll and a building permit.

Most of what people believe those three records 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.
Each record has its own holder. Deeds sit with a recorder, rolls with an assessor, permits with a building department.
Searching is usually free online. Certified copies are not, and most indexes lag weeks behind a closing.

The deed, the roll and the permit, holder by holder

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

The deed or transfer record. In New York City the holder is the Department of Finance, through ACRIS, the Automated City Register Information System. It indexes deeds and other land documents for all five boroughs, most of them from 1966 onward.

A deed shows that an instrument transferring an interest in a parcel was lodged, when, and between which named parties. The names are often legal entities: companies, trusts or nominees.

The consideration stated is sometimes the price, sometimes a nominal figure, sometimes absent, depending on local practice. Los Angeles County keeps the same kind of index at its Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, searchable by name, document number or parcel.

The assessment roll. In New York City the Department of Finance publishes a tentative roll each January and a final roll in May. Class 1 homes, the one to three family houses, are assessed at 6% of market value. Most other property is assessed at 45%.

California starts from a different rule. Proposition 13 fixed a base year value in 1975-76, caps the annual increase at 2% until the property sells, and resets the value at sale. The Los Angeles County Assessor publishes those figures.

Cook County, Illinois, assesses residential property at 10% of market value. It reassesses one of three geographic groups each year on a three-year cycle, and its Clerk records deeds while its Assessor sets values.

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. New York posts permits, complaints and violations through DOB NOW and the older Buildings Information System, searchable by borough, block and lot. Los Angeles opens its permit and inspection records through the Department of Building and Safety, searchable by address or Assessor's Parcel Number.

Chicago publishes its building permits as an open data set. These records state 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, and by the recorder where plats are filed. They describe the parcel geometry and what may be built on it. New York publishes tax maps through the Department of Finance, and Los Angeles publishes zoning through ZIMAS, its Zoning Information and Map Access System.

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.

The three records, compared on the questions a reader actually has:

Recorded deed (ACRIS, New York City)

Who holds it: City Register, Department of Finance
What it states: That an instrument was lodged, the date, the named parties, the stated consideration
What it cannot show: Who lives there, the real price, the condition
Search cost: Free
Typical copy fee: $1 to $5 a page certified; recording $10 to $150
Update lag: Weeks after closing

Assessment roll (NYC Department of Finance)

Who holds it: Assessor side of the Department of Finance
What it states: A value set by a statutory method, plus a parcel and building description; Class 1 at 6% of market value
What it cannot show: A market price
Search cost: Free
Typical copy fee: Nominal, free online
Update lag: January tentative roll, May final roll

Building permit (DOB NOW, New York City)

Who holds it: Department of Buildings
What it states: The scope approved, the contractor of record, the fee paid, inspection results
What it cannot show: Whether the work was finished, or done as approved
Search cost: Free
Typical copy fee: $0.25 to a few dollars a page
Update lag: Posted as filings and inspections are entered

Searches on ACRIS, DOB NOW and the Los Angeles County index are free. Certified copies typically run $1 to $5 a page at a county recorder, and recording a deed typically costs $10 to $150 depending on the state and the page count.

What the deed, the roll and the permit cannot 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.

ACRIS indexes deeds by name as well as by parcel, so one search returns every property a name touches. 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. New York City's real property transfer tax is 1% of the price below $500,000 and 1.425% at or above it. New York State adds a mansion tax of 1% to 3.9% on homes of $1 million or more.

Both taxes are computed from the consideration stated on the deed, whatever that figure says. 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. That can be weeks after the agreement, and sometimes years. The date on the record is a floor, not the closing date.

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. A permit describes what was approved, not what stands there now.

Common mistakes and better choices

Record mistakes vs. better choices

Mistake

Assessed value as price: Tax input only
Listing price as sale: Asking is not agreeing
Deed name as occupant: Ownership is not occupancy
Entity name as concealment: Ordinary tax and liability use
Recording date as deal date: Recording lags agreement
Chain to track a person: This is surveillance
Permit as finished work: Approval, not completion
Records assumed current: Registries lag; errors persist

Better choice

Assessed value as price: Read assessor's method
Listing price as sale: Ignore for facts
Deed name as occupant: Do not identify occupants
Entity name as concealment: Draw no inference
Recording date as deal date: Treat as date floor
Chain to track a person: Stop; refuse this use
Permit as finished work: Look for final inspection
Records assumed current: Ask holding body

Mistake	Why it is wrong	Better choice
Treating the assessed value on the New York roll as the price	Class 1 property is assessed at 6% of market value, and the figure exists for taxation	Read the assessor's published method; treat the number as a tax input only
Treating a California assessed value as a market price	Proposition 13 holds a base year value and caps increases at 2% a year until a sale	Use the Los Angeles County Assessor figure as a tax base, and value the building from the fabric and the permits
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 an ACRIS recording date as a transaction date	Recording lags the agreement, sometimes by years	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 a DOB NOW permit as proof of finished work	A permit is approval, not completion	Look for the final inspection or the certificate of occupancy, if the authority keeps them
Assuming the index is complete and current	ACRIS begins in 1966 for most documents, and registries lag	Ask the holding body for the current entry, and check the older borough indexes

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.

In New York that history comes from DOB NOW or the Buildings Information System. In Los Angeles it comes from the Department of Building and Safety permit search. A plat tells you the lot geometry that drove the plan, 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. Los Angeles publishes its zoning through ZIMAS. 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. ACRIS, the Los Angeles County index and Chicago's permit data can be searched by anyone, free, from anywhere. That does not make its aggregation harmless.

The records sit scattered across bodies, formats and dates. Assembling them is the practical protection most people have.

A page that does the assembling removes that protection for every reader at once, including the one reader who should not have it.

That is why the answer here is a rule, not a judgment call. Institutions open to the public publish their own locations and count as institutions. Private houses are described as buildings, without records tying them to anyone.

The same rule applies to houses in dense cities, where 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 do these records cost to pull?

Searches on ACRIS, DOB NOW, the Los Angeles County index and the Chicago permit data are free. Certified copies typically cost $1 to $5 a page, and recording a deed carries a fee, typically $10 to $150 depending on the state and the page count. A private title search is priced separately.

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.