What we do not claim
This list is the reason to trust everything else. It is kept current, and a report repeats whichever line applies to it, in place of the answer it cannot give. If you find something missing from this page, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
- 1. The reachable figure is a floor, and it has not been validated against title searches We could report an estimate. We report a floor, because a creditor who acts on an optimistic estimate loses money and a creditor who acts on a floor does not. The direction of error is argued and stated on every report. The magnitude is not yet quantified. Validation against title searches is in progress, and the result goes here whichever way it falls.
- 2. A reachable figure is four New York City boroughs only Staten Island keeps its land records with its own County Clerk and is not in the register. Philadelphia's index holds mortgages and their satisfactions, and the figure is not computed there yet. No reachable figure is computed anywhere else in the country.
- 3. Older satisfactions do not always link Some historic mortgages still read as live even where a paper satisfaction exists. Any parcel whose verdict turns on one of those is marked on the report, so you know when the answer depends on a link we could not make.
- 4. New York private money judgments are not in yet The State's own warrants are, 225,457 of them live in the boroughs. County Clerk judgments are not, so a New York debtor with no claim shown may still have been sued.
Five more, in full They apply to fewer reports and they rarely change what you do with one, but they are here because the list has to be complete.
- 5. Litigation dates are federal only Most people are sued in state court. Absence from the federal docket is not absence from litigation.
- 6. Florida claims tie to a name, not to a lot Broward's index runs from 1978 and holds 2.4M final judgments, 4.2M mortgages and 1.6M liens. Almost none of them carry a parcel identifier, only deeds do, so we can tell you a name has a mortgage and not that a lot does. No reachable figure is computed in Florida.
- 7. Broward is only partly in the live search 32 million documents are held and verified against the county's own file sizes, and the transfer leads are produced from them. A party reaches the live name search where the Florida roll confirms it by address, or where a claim names someone the roll lists as a current owner. A name the roll cannot confirm, or one too common to tie to one person, is held and not searchable.
- 8. Most of the country is ownership and transfers, not what is owed Parcel rolls reach 1,919 counties across 46 states and DC, including all 67 in Florida, where homestead is screened against the acreage, residency and ownership tests with the authority for each rule printed beside the verdict. Recorded transfers reach 847 counties, and in 463 of them only the most recent transfer is held, so an earlier deed will not show. Outside New York City, Philadelphia and three Florida counties the encumbrance side is not held, so an empty claim list means nobody looked.
- 9. Vessels are not available at any price The Coast Guard removed owner names from its vessel data in 2018. Aircraft are complete, nationwide.
Why this page exists
A judgment creditor decides whether to spend money on enforcement. That decision is only as good as the worst thing they do not know about the data.
So every one of these is on the report as well as on this page. If a parcel's verdict depends on a satisfaction link we could not make, the report says so next to the verdict. If the register was never searched, it returns no recorder data rather than unencumbered. An empty list is not an all clear, and a system that says otherwise is worse than no system.
Send a name from a case you have closed. We run it and you tell us whether we were right. If we were not, you have lost an email.