A glossary of register terms

0:33Everything is one of four classes

Start with the classes. Everything is one of four.

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 just labelled party one and party two, because the code covers too many things to name the roles.

So the party fields are positions. They're 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 it.

1:36The pairs that get confused

Now, the pairs that get confused. Four of them, and each one is a direction rather than a rank.

Grantor and grantee. The grantor gives, the grantee gets. So a deed out of your debtor has the debtor as grantor, and that's 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. And here's the trick for remembering it: 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 it means the debt didn't 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.

2:32Codes worth recognizing on sight

Then there are 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. 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, which is the instrument that retires it. ASST is an assignment of mortgage. UCC 1 opens a financing statement, and UCC 3 amends, continues or terminates one. So if you find a UCC 3 with no UCC 1 before it in the same index, that's a loose end, and it's worth following.

And AGMT is an agreement, filed in the mortgage class. That's the code that hides the most, so slow down when you see it. A modification, an extension or a subordination can all arrive under it.

3:34Words that mean something narrower than they sound

Now, words that mean something narrower than they sound. Three of them cause more trouble than everything else put together, and two of the three look completely harmless.

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

Satisfied. On a judgment it means the debt was paid and an entry was made under CPLR 5021. On a mortgage it means a separate certificate was recorded. And RPL 321 doesn't 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 amount, and its description is the principal debt or obligation. That's the figure the instrument stated on the day it was recorded. No field anywhere in the dataset holds a balance.

4:36The identifiers

Then the identifiers, because three numbers do different jobs and they aren't 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'd 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 a string somebody typed on a form, and it's the least reliable key in the building.

5:09What this does not cover

Here's what this doesn't cover.

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

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

I'm not a lawyer and none of this is advice. What I can give you is narrower, and it's the thing I said at the start. Party one on a satisfaction is the borrower. That one sentence saves you the 20 minutes it otherwise takes to work out, from a screen full of names.

Keep that one sentence about party one and you'll read a satisfaction correctly the first time you meet one. Everything else I've written assumes this vocabulary, so this is the piece to come back to.