Quick Answer
Agents, brokerages, and developers work from the public record behind each property: building characteristics, recorded sales and transfers, assessed values and taxes, parcel boundaries, acreage and zoning, and the owner of record. It comes from county assessor, recorder, and GIS offices, and it is used to pull comparable sales, prepare seller presentations and buyer briefs, and test what land can support. Teams that work more than one market license it from a provider that normalizes roughly 3,000 county formats into one schema.
Summary
Agents and developers start from the same facts about a property and read them for different jobs. An agent reads the square footage, lot, year built, sale history, and recorded sales nearby to brief a seller or a buyer. A brokerage needs that record in the same shape in every market its agents cover, so seller presentations and buyer briefs start from consistent facts. A developer reads the acreage, zoning, and boundaries to decide what the land can hold, and whether neighboring parcels can be combined. All of it is public record, published by roughly 3,000 counties in their own formats on their own schedules, which is why teams that work more than one market license it from a provider that normalizes it into one schema and delivers it by API or bulk transfer.
The fields a deal runs on
Four groups cover most real estate work. Characteristics describe the building: building and living area, bedrooms and bathrooms, year built, stories, and features such as a pool or garage. Sales, tax, and valuation carry the numbers: recorded sale prices and dates, assessed values, the tax amount and year, and an automated valuation where one can be produced. Land and zoning describe the parcel: acreage, land area, zoning code, land-use code, frontage, and depth. Ownership and transfers complete the record: the owner of record and the document trail behind each recorded sale.
Comparable sales tie the groups together. A comparables search returns recent recorded sales around a property, within a radius and look-back window the caller sets, so a value arrives with the sales behind it.
Where the data comes from
Nearly all of it is public record. County assessors publish building characteristics, assessed values, and the tax roll. County recorders file deeds and transfers, which is where recorded prices and the owner of record come from. GIS departments publish parcel boundaries, acreage, and zoning. Together they describe every parcel the county records, whether or not it is for sale.
The difficulty is scale. Each county chooses its own field names, formats, identifiers, and publication cadence, so a team working more than a few markets ends up maintaining a parser per county or buying a one-off extract per market. A provider like Realie collects at the source, normalizes the counties into one schema keyed by parcel, refreshes it on a rolling, per-county cycle so vintage varies by county, and delivers it by API for per-property lookups or by bulk transfer for market-wide work.
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 establishing an individual's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing, including tenant screening, or for any other FCRA-regulated purpose.
Real estate workflows sit inside that boundary because they start from a property or an area: a deal under review, a parcel a developer is assembling, or a seller or buyer an agent is briefing. The automated valuation is a reference value with its comparable sales, not an appraisal.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
- Does the record cover properties that are not for sale?
- Yes. The public record covers every parcel the county records, whether or not it is on the market, so characteristics, recorded sales, tax, zoning, and owner of record are available for any property you are evaluating.
- How do I pull comparable sales for a property?
- Use the comparables search with the property's latitude and longitude. It returns recent recorded sales within a radius and look-back window you set, one mile and 18 months by default, and up to 50 results, each with its sale price and date.
- Is the automated valuation an appraisal?
- No. Property records include a modelValue estimate where Realie can produce one, and the comparables search shows the sales behind a number. Both are a starting point for pricing, not a substitute for an appraisal.
- Can I screen a county for parcels of a given size and zoning?
- Yes, with bulk delivery. Load the county or state into your warehouse or GIS and filter by acreage, zoning, and land-use code there. The API is built for lookups by address, parcel ID, or location rather than market-wide screens.
- Can this data be used to screen tenants or buyers?
- No. It is public-record property data, not a consumer report. Realie's Terms of Use prohibit using it as a factor in an individual's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing, including tenant screening, or for any other FCRA-regulated purpose.
- How do real estate teams access the data?
- Through a REST API for lookups and comparable sales, through bulk transfers of state or nationwide datasets delivered to the team's cloud storage, or through the MCP server for AI assistants. Self-service API plans start free, and bulk is licensed separately.