Quick Answer
Real estate investors use the public record behind each address: parcel identifiers and characteristics, owner of record, assessed and taxable values, recorded sales and transfers, mortgages and liens on file, and valuation estimates with comparable recorded sales for context. It originates with county assessor, recorder, and GIS offices. Investors either pull it county by county or license it from a provider that normalizes roughly 3,000 county formats into one schema and delivers it by API or bulk transfer for portfolio analytics.
Summary
Investment workflows start from an address, a parcel, or a portfolio. Acquisition teams need characteristics, tax and lien history, and recorded sales to underwrite a deal. Portfolio managers need the same fields at scale to track equity, exposure, and turnover across markets. Research teams need location and map-bounds search to screen submarkets without maintaining a parser per county. The data is public record, but it is scattered across roughly 3,000 counties in different layouts on different schedules. A normalized property data provider keys everything to the parcel, standardizes field names, refreshes on a rolling per-county cycle, and delivers the record by API for per-property lookups or by bulk file for portfolio-wide analytics.
The fields investors actually use
Four groups cover most investment workflows. Identity and characteristics tie every analysis to the right parcel: normalized address, parcel ID, coordinates, lot and building area, year built, stories, construction and roof, and zoning. Ownership and tax show who holds title and what the county bills: owner of record, mailing address, assessed and taxable values, and tax amounts. Encumbrances and transfers show leverage and history: recorded mortgages and liens with lender names and estimated balances, plus transfer dates, prices, and document types. Valuation and comps-style context add a reference estimate and recent recorded sales near the subject through an automated valuation and a comparables endpoint built from public records — not MLS listings.
The same record serves every stage. Screening reads characteristics and sales in a map bounds or submarket. Underwriting reads tax, liens, and transfer history on one address. Portfolio monitoring reads encumbrances and ownership changes across a held list. Research reads aggregates from bulk delivery when the question spans a whole market.
Address-first lookup and portfolio analytics
Most investor tools begin with an address or parcel ID lookup that returns the full normalized record in one response, then cache or store what the product needs. Owner search by name helps map a known individual or entity to holdings across a state when the workflow starts from the owner rather than the address.
Portfolio analytics usually combine stored identifiers with periodic refresh: bulk transfers for baseline files, then API calls for deltas on addresses that changed hands or recorded new liens. Location search returns up to 100 parcels per request inside map bounds, which supports submarket counts and characteristic filters without pre-building every county extract yourself.
Where the data comes from
Nearly all of it is public record. County assessors publish characteristics, assessed values, and tax rolls. County recorders file deeds, mortgages, releases, and liens. GIS departments publish parcel boundaries and coordinates. Automated valuations and lien balance estimates are modeled from those records and from recorded sales, not from MLS or listing feeds.
The difficulty is scale. Each county chooses its own field names, formats, identifiers, and publication cadence, so an investor active in more than a few markets ends up maintaining a parser per county or buying one-off extracts per deal. A provider like Realie collects at the source, normalizes counties into one schema keyed by parcel, refreshes on a rolling per-county cycle as counties publish, and delivers through an API for per-address work or bulk transfers for portfolio-wide analytics.
What property data is not
Property data describes a parcel, not a person. It is not a credit report, and Realie is not a consumer reporting agency. Realie's Terms of Use prohibit using the data as a factor in an individual's credit eligibility, insurance underwriting, employment, or tenant screening, or for any other FCRA-regulated purpose.
Realie does not provide skip-trace phone numbers, owner contact enrichment, tenant-screening scores, or MLS listing inventory and photos. Investment workflows stay inside the boundary when they analyze recorded facts about properties and portfolios — not when they score or contact individuals.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I analyze comps from recorded sales rather than MLS?
- Yes. Recorded transfer prices and dates come from county recorder filings, and Realie exposes a comparables endpoint that returns recent recorded sales near a subject for valuation context. That is comps-style analysis from public records, not active listing data.
- Which lien and mortgage fields help with underwriting?
- Recorded lien count, lender name, estimated total lien balance, estimated equity, and estimated combined loan-to-value, alongside transfer history with recording dates and prices. Balances and equity are estimates derived from recorded documents; vintage varies by county.
- Can I search holdings by owner name?
- Yes. Pass owner name and state to the owner search endpoints to find parcels tied to an individual or entity on the assessor roll. Use it for portfolio mapping from public records, not for skip-trace or cold outreach.
- Should I use the API or bulk delivery for a portfolio?
- Use the API for per-deal lookups, watchlists, and refresh on changed addresses. Use bulk delivery when you need a baseline file for an entire state or the country to power analytics, models, or internal indexes in your own storage.
- Does the record include an automated valuation (AVM)?
- Realie's record includes a modelValue automated valuation where one can be produced, with a comparables endpoint for the recorded sales behind the estimate. Treat it as a reference for analysis, not a substitute for an appraisal or an offer price.
- Can this data be used for tenant screening or credit decisions?
- No. It is public-record property data, not a consumer report. Realie's Terms of Use prohibit FCRA-regulated uses including tenant screening and credit eligibility.