If you already use a people-search product
Most firms that arrive here already pay for something. A people-search product answers where a person is and which identifiers attach to them, and it is built for that. A report assembled from a county register answers a different question: what is recorded against a piece of property in the order it was recorded, and how much of the value is left under the claims sitting ahead of yours. This page is about the distance between those two questions, and about the fact that there is nothing here to apply for.
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.
The names, first
Accurint is a LexisNexis product rather than a separate company, which is why the two names keep turning up in the same sentence. TLOxp is a TransUnion product, and TLO was the name of the company TransUnion acquired rather than a description of the search.
Both sit in a category usually called data aggregation, or people search. Many feeds about people, resolved into one identity that you query by name. is the older word for the work and it is decades older than any of these products. A skip is a debtor who moved. Tracing is finding them. The term is ordinary in collections and in litigation support, and it has been since long before it had software attached. Restrictions attach to the sources a search draws on and to the purpose a result is put to, never to the label on the activity, and what applies to a Collecteral report is set out on what reports may be used for.
What each kind is built to answer
An aggregator is built around a person. The questions it exists for look like this:
- Where is this person now, and where were they before?
- Which phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and employers attach to this identity?
- Which of the four Robert Kims in the file is mine?
- Is there property somewhere carrying this name?
A -derived report is built around a , and the questions are narrower:
- What instruments are recorded against this lot?
- In what order were they recorded, since recording order sets ?
- Which of them has a later document retiring it?
- After the live ones, what is left?
Both sets are legitimate. Only the second set decides whether filing is worth the filing fee.
What the difference costs you
Take the parcel in the sample report. Two mortgages are recorded against it, one in 2004 for $780,000 and one in 2011 for $920,000.
A list of what is recorded against that owner shows $1.7m of debt, and on those numbers a $310,000 judgment against a property worth $1,840,000 looks marginal. But the register also holds a , recorded in 2011, which retires the 2004 mortgage. Live mortgage debt is therefore $920,000. Add a New York State tax warrant of $34,102, subtract both from the market value on the roll, and the floor under the senior claims is $885,898. The judgment is covered nearly three times over.
Nothing about locating the debtor produces that figure. It comes from matching one recorded document to another and knowing which one wins.
Can anyone get access?
Products assembled from restricted feeds gate the door. An applicant is credentialed and a permissible use is selected before a search will run, and that gate is the correct design for what is behind it.
It is also why a solo practitioner with four judgments a year either cannot clear the credentialing or decides it costs more than four searches are worth. Collecteral runs no credentialing and takes no permissible-use attestation. There is no application. What a report may be used for arrives as a restriction you accept rather than a status you are screened for, and it is written out in full on what reports may be used for.
What we do not do
Bank accounts are not in any register, so we do not find them. We do not locate people, and we hold no phone numbers and no email addresses.
Coverage is the harder limit. Mortgages and satisfactions are four New York City boroughs. Claims against a name are Broward County in Florida, and Broward is queried rather than searchable today. If your debtor is in Ohio, none of this helps you. The complete list of what a report cannot answer, including the four-borough boundary and the historic satisfactions that do not always link, is on what we do not claim, and it is short enough to read before you decide anything.
So the honest position is that a firm doing enforcement work probably wants both. Find the person with the tool built to find people. Then ask the register what stands against what they own, and what is left underneath it. If you want to test the second half, send three debtors from closed matters and grade the reports against what you already know.