Realie sources ownership records — owner of record and owner mailing address — directly from county assessors and recorders across 3,100+ counties, alongside assessment, tax, and transfer history for each parcel.
Ownership is the field people most often need and most often misread. What a county publishes is the owner of record: the name on the assessment roll or the most recently recorded deed. That is authoritative for what was filed, but it is not always the beneficial owner. Properties are frequently held through LLCs, trusts, or estates, and the mailing address on file may be a registered agent rather than a person. Realie normalizes ownership fields for consistency while preserving the raw county values, so you can see exactly what the county lists and when it last changed.
The owner of record is what the county has on file. When a property is held by an LLC, that entity name is the owner of record, and the individuals behind it are not part of the county record at all. Trusts and estates behave similarly.
This matters for outreach and for portfolio analysis. Treating an entity name as a person produces bad mail and bad analytics; recognizing it as an entity lets you group holdings across parcels, which is usually the more valuable signal.
Ownership changes when a deed is recorded, but the assessment roll may not reflect it until the county’s next cycle. That creates a window where the recorder shows a new owner and the assessor still shows the previous one — not an error, just two records maintained on different schedules.
For workflows where recency matters, look at transfer history and recorded deed dates rather than the assessment roll alone, and treat the two sources as complementary.