A glossary of register terms

Listen instead

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.

That same recording, with the writing lit line by line as it plays and the sections listed beside it, is on its own page.

Everything is one of four classes

New York City's register sorts its document types into four classes, and knowing which class a code belongs to tells you what the two party fields mean before you read anything else.

Deeds and other conveyances, where party one is the grantor or seller and party two is the grantee or buyer. Mortgages and instruments, where party one is the mortgagor or borrower and party two is the mortgagee or lender. UCC and federal liens, where the parties are the debtor and the secured party. And a fourth class of other documents, where the fields are labelled party one and party two because the code covers too many things to name the roles.

The party fields are positions, not people. Party one on a satisfaction is the borrower, which surprises anybody expecting the lender to be first because the lender is the one signing.

The pairs that get confused

Four pairs, and each one is a direction rather than a rank.

Grantor and grantee. The grantor gives, the grantee gets. A deed out of the debtor has the debtor as grantor, and that is the instrument worth reading against the voidable transfer sections.

Mortgagor and mortgagee. Your mortgagor is the borrower, who owns the property and grants the interest. Your mortgagee is the lender. Whichever word sounds to you like the owner is the one that means the bank.

Assignor and assignee. On an assignment of mortgage the register labels them the old lender and the new lender, which is clearer than the Latin and means the debt did not change, only the party entitled to be paid.

And debtor and secured party, on anything in the UCC class. Whoever owns the collateral is the debtor.

Codes worth recognizing on sight

A handful of four letter codes carry most of the meaning in a judgment enforcement search.

DEED is a deed and CORRD is a correction deed, which is a fix to an earlier one rather than a new conveyance. MTGE is a mortgage. SAT is a satisfaction of mortgage, the instrument that retires it. ASST is an assignment of mortgage. UCC1 opens a financing statement and UCC3 amends, continues or terminates one, so a UCC3 with no UCC1 before it in the same index is a loose end worth following.

AGMT is an agreement, filed in the mortgage class, and it is the code that hides the most: a modification, an extension or a subordination can all arrive under it.

Words that mean something narrower than they sound

Three of them cause more trouble than everything else on this page put together, and two of the three look entirely harmless.

Recorded. It means a clerk stamped and indexed the instrument, and under Fla. Stat. 695.01(1)¹ that is what makes a conveyance good against creditors and later purchasers who took without notice. Nobody checked whether the document was true.

Satisfied. On a judgment it means the debt was paid and an entry was made under CPLR 5021². On a mortgage it means a separate certificate was recorded, and RPL 321³ does not require the mortgage's own record to be marked in a county that indexes by block.

Amount. In the ACRIS master table the field is document_amt and its description is the principal debt or obligation. That is the figure the instrument stated on the day it was recorded, and no field anywhere in the dataset holds a balance.

The identifiers

Three numbers do different jobs and are not interchangeable.

A document identifier is the register's internal key for the record. A City Register File Number, which ACRIS calls crfn, is the citation you would give somebody so they can pull the instrument. And a borough, block and lot is the parcel, which is what the legals table is keyed to and what a search of a property has to start from.

A name is not an identifier. It is a string somebody typed on a form, and it is the least reliable key in the building.

What this does not cover

One city's code table, out of every county in two states.

Those four classes and the party labels above are New York City's. Broward's official records, the Florida property appraiser files and the Department of State each use their own vocabulary, and a code that means one thing in one index means nothing in another. Concepts travel. Codes do not.

Nobody writing this is a lawyer and none of it is advice. What a page can do is narrower. It can tell you that party one on a satisfaction is the borrower, and save you the twenty minutes it otherwise takes to work that out from a screen full of names.