New York City: what ACRIS holds and what the County Clerk holds

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The same material, read aloud and told more loosely than it is written. Nothing is said in it that this page does not also say.

What ACRIS holds

ACRIS is the City Register's system, and the City Register is the recording office for property documents in four of the five boroughs.

Property documents in four boroughs run through one office. The Office of the City Register records and keeps New York City real property records, and certain personal property transfer records such as mortgage documents, for the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. That is the Department of Finance's own description. Staten Island is the exception the same page carves out: those properties go to the Richmond County Clerk instead.

ACRIS, the Automated City Register Information System, lets anyone search property records and view document images for those four boroughs from 1966 to the present. Documents filed before January 1, 1966 are not online at all. They are searched in person at the Land Records Research Library in the Queens City Register office, the Department of Finance says. So a 1966 wall runs across the whole system, and below it there is no screen to search.

Who this office is comes from the statutes. Tax Law 1401¹ makes the city register New York City's recording officer for the real estate transfer tax. New York's UCC 9-501² makes the city register the filing and recording officer for UCC filings in Bronx, Kings, New York and Queens counties. And RPL 291³ has a conveyance recorded in the office of the clerk of the county where the land is, recorded by the county clerk or city registrar where applicable.

Property records are public. One caution from the Department of Finance is worth repeating: reviewing them is not necessarily the same as a title search. Reading a record yourself tells you what the document says, not whether the chain is clean.

What the County Clerk holds

A judgment docket is a different book in a different office, kept by the clerk of the county.

In the CPLR, 'clerk' in supreme and county court means the clerk of the county. CPLR 105(e)⁴ says so. That clerk dockets a money judgment immediately after the judgment-roll is filed, under CPLR 5018⁵. An entry sits under the surname of the first-named judgment debtor and carries each debtor's name and last known address, the creditor, the sum in figures, the dates and times of filing and docketing, the court and county, with the creditor's attorney. CPLR 5018(c) lists all of it.

Docketing is the act that does the work. From the moment a money judgment is docketed with the clerk of the county where the debtor's land is, a transfer of that land is not effective against the judgment creditor, subject to the exceptions the section names. CPLR 5203⁶ ties the lien to the docket date, not to anything in a property-records system.

Judgments reach other counties by transcript. A transcript filed with another county clerk is docketed there under CPLR 5018, and a United States court judgment rendered or filed in the state is docketed by transcript with any county clerk under CPLR 5018(b). A foreign judgment, with the creditor's affidavit, is filed with any county clerk within 90 days of authentication. CPLR 5402(a)⁷ sets that window.

A notice of pendency lives in the same office. It is filed in the office of the clerk of a county where the property is, under CPLR 6511(a)⁸, and the county clerk records it immediately and indexes it against the blocks or names it designates, under CPLR 6511(c). After 10 years from the judgment-roll the sheriff's notice of levy is recorded and indexed the same way under CPLR 5235⁹, which does not reach an execution issued upon a judgment for any part of a mortgage debt on the same property. A county clerk may keep these dockets electronically or by any other method the clerk deems suitable, which CPLR 5018(d) permits, so the book may be a screen.

Where to look for each

In New York City the recording officer and the clerk who dockets judgments are two offices, so the two records are kept apart.

For conveyances and mortgage documents in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, the office is the City Register, searched in ACRIS. For Staten Island property documents, it is the Richmond County Clerk. For a money judgment, the office is the county clerk's docket, in each county where the judgment was entered or docketed by transcript. Two searches, because there are two offices and ACRIS is only one of them.

A notice of pendency is where the CPLR says it is: filed with the clerk of the county where the property is. Whether the City Register also records one, so that it would turn up in ACRIS, the statute does not say. This page will not guess. For what a notice of pendency actually does to a property, a lis pendens is notice, not a lien is the place that question belongs.

How each borough's County Clerk docket is searched, online or in person and by whom, is not settled here. What can be said is that ACRIS index data is also published on NYC Open Data, and the City Register offers subscription data services for large volumes. So the four-borough property record is reachable in bulk. The docket is a separate errand.