What Are Property Records?
Property records are the paper trail behind every home in America — and in all 50 states, they're public.
Definition
Property records are the official documents that describe a parcel of real estate and its history. They're maintained by local government — primarily the county assessor (characteristics and value) and the county recorder (deeds, sales, liens) — and, in all 50 U.S. states, they're public.
What's in them
- Physical facts — address, property type, beds, baths, square footage, lot size, year built.
- Transaction history — past sales, dates, and prices.
- Tax & assessment — assessed value and annual property tax.
- Parcel identity — the Assessor Parcel Number (APN) and county FIPS code.
These are the facts our dataset compiles. See the full field list in the data dictionary.
Are they public?
Yes. Real-property records are public in all 50 states — recorded deeds, parcel data, and assessed values are maintained by county offices and available to anyone, usually online. The catch is that they're spread across thousands of separate county systems in inconsistent formats, which makes them hard to use at any scale.
A note on privacy
County records often include the owner of record. RealEstateDataset publishes property facts only — no owner names or personal information. We're interested in the homes, not the people in them.
From records to a dataset
Compiling every county's records into one clean, standardized file is exactly what RealEstateDataset does — ~146M properties, free to download by state, county or ZIP. Each row carries a stable id; pass it to the Straply API as GET /property/{id} to query that property's current state.
Frequently asked
Are property records public?
What information is in a property record?
Do property records show the owner?
How do I look up property records for one address?