What a UCC filing attaches to

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.

It is filed against a person, not against a lot

A financing statement perfects a security interest in personal property. UCC 9-502¹ sets out what it must contain, and the list is short: the debtor's name, the secured party's name, and an indication of the collateral.

No parcel identifier appears in that list. UCC 9-519² requires the filing office to index an initial financing statement according to the name of the debtor, and to associate every later record with the initial one.

So the index is built around a name. Searching a lot will not find it, which is a different failure from finding nothing.

The four that go in the land records

UCC 9-501(a)³ names the exceptions and there are exactly four.

A financing statement goes to the office where a mortgage on the related real property would be recorded when the collateral is as-extracted collateral, when it is timber to be cut, when the statement is filed as a fixture filing and the collateral is goods that are or will become fixtures, or when the collateral is a co-operative interest. Everything else goes to the secretary of state.

Subsection (a)(2) closes the gap somebody would otherwise walk through. Where the collateral is fixtures but the statement was not filed as a fixture filing, it goes to the secretary of state like anything else. The collateral does not decide the office. The kind of filing does.

In New York the recording officer is the county clerk, except in the Bronx, Kings, New York and Queens, where 9-501(c) makes it the city register.

What that means for a search of a parcel

A UCC in a property index is evidence about the property. A UCC absent from one is evidence about nothing.

The debtor may have a dozen financing statements against equipment, inventory and receivables, every one of them properly filed and none of them visible in any land record. Finding none in a parcel search says only that none of the four categories applied, which is the ordinary case.

A fixture filing is the one worth reading carefully when it appears, because it is a claim on something that is part of the building. It is also the one most likely to be stale, for the reason below.

Five years, and then it is gone

UCC 9-515(a)⁴ makes a filed financing statement effective for five years from the date of filing. Subsection (c) does the rest of the work.

On lapse the statement ceases to be effective, and any security interest perfected by it becomes unperfected unless perfected some other way. The sentence after that is the one to remember: if it becomes unperfected on lapse, it is deemed never to have been perfected as against a purchaser of the collateral for value.

A continuation may be filed, but only within the six months before expiry, under 9-515(d). So a financing statement from 2015 with nothing after it is not a claim that is merely old. It is a claim that stopped.

Three exceptions carry longer clocks. Public-financed and manufactured-home transactions run thirty years where the statement says so, a co-operative interest runs fifty years where a co-operative addendum is filed, and a transmitting utility's filing runs until a termination statement is filed.

When the mortgage is itself the filing

UCC 9-502(c) allows a record of a mortgage to operate as a financing statement filed as a fixture filing, and 9-515(g) gives that arrangement its own duration.

Such a record stays effective as a fixture filing until the mortgage is released or satisfied of record, or its effectiveness otherwise ends as to the real property. No five year clock, no continuation statements.

Which means a document indexed as a mortgage may be doing two jobs, and the second one is invisible unless the instrument is read. Counting it once as a mortgage is right. Concluding there is no fixture claim because no separate UCC appears is not.

What this does not cover

Priority among competing security interests, which is most of article nine and none of this page.

Fla. Stat. 679.3171⁵ and its New York counterpart set out who takes free of a security interest and who takes ahead of it, and the answers turn on purchase money status, control, possession and the order of perfection. None of that is readable from an index entry, and a filing that exists is not the same as a filing that wins.

Nobody writing this is a lawyer and none of it is advice. Whether a particular financing statement reaches a particular asset is a question for counsel with the security agreement in front of them. What a page can do is narrower. It can tell you which office to look in, and that the one you are looking in holds four kinds of filing out of all the kinds there are.