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Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
I get a lot of letters in the mail, texts, and phone calls from real estate investors trying to buy one of my rental properties. I know they found my info by checking county assessor offices, but why is this information publicly published by every county in the US?
I recognize that this data is super valuable, particularly to brokers and wholesalers, so I'm curious why websites like Zillow don't also publish the name of the owner of a property, yet they publish all other information about the property and its history?
- LinuxBender 3y agoI do not have an answer for your specific question and I am not an expert on this but for what it's worth one can purchase properties in the name of a trust or a business. It will still be public but a trust can be anonymously named in some states. This can have property tax implications depending on the type of trust and the state so review the options in your location with a lawyer knowledgeable in trusts and property taxes.
- bozhark 3y agoTrust, business, LLC, foundation, church. There’s many options
- uberman 3y agoI think one reason is historically, if you and I own property next to each other but you pay twice the property tax that I pay, the public might have an interest in knowing who I was and how I got a sweetheart assessment. If you want to obfuscate your ownership i imagine you could create a trust or LLC and transfer and sell your direct ownership to the new entity. This might have some short and long term tax implications and I would consult a tak expert. Many ranches were i live are now owned by family trusts i assume for inheritance reasons.
- giantg2 3y agoWhy would they publish names? It's really no value to home buyers to see the name associated with a listing. In some cases, there are antidiscrimination laws that limit what information should be disclosed to sellers and buyers. Name might be one of those.
- cpursley 3y agoAll this is available (including names of owners) from your typical government assessors web portal. Or via consolidators where the ownership, zoning, acreage, tax assessments and other data is available via an api call.
- giantg2 3y agoYeah? But what benefit is the name to buyers; and does providing the name in that context violate any fair practices? Those are the real questions here.
- brewdad 3y agoOnly a single data point but if you tried to make assumptions about my wife based on her name (married or maiden) you would likely be very, very wrong.
- Axsuul 3y agoNot worth the trouble for them. They'll just end up getting thousands of takedown requests per day for information that has no value to their users.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- beardyw 3y agoBecause people have been living in houses for millennia and such an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few decades.
- 13of40 3y agoIn fact, only two or three decades ago it was standard for the telephone service to print everyone's name, address, and phone number in a big book, distribute it to every house and charge you $5 a month extra if you wanted to opt out of the list.
- smugma 3y ago<15 years ago a friend went and got thousands of signatures to make phone books opt in vs opt out in SF. He did some sort of stunt where he collected over a thousand phone books and took a picture of them in front of city hall or other public place.
- Gibbon1 3y agoIn the past I've tracked down the names of people in old photo's with a viable house number by guessing the city and searching newspaper archives. Then confirm with a streetview. The archives will have articles mentioning people with their street address. My thought is Americans have become really paranoid compared to people 50 years ago. And people are often under the illusion that people can find out a lot about you with little effort isn't true.
- jfengel 3y agoComputers have made a lot of information that was theoretically accessible into pragmatically accessible. There was a kind of semi privacy that is changing. Some have adjusted by insisting that it was genuine privacy all along. Others don't care that semi private is now public, largely because they still feel pragmatically anonymous and unthreatened by what isn't. Neither is entirely wrong, but the ones with the strongest feelings either way don't do a great job of taking the others into account.
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- Digory 3y ago1. The Public needs to know if they are permitted to be at a place or not. Or even if they can claim it. Homesteading in the US (claiming public land as private land) only ended in 1986. 2. Because police need to know who belongs at a place, and who to exclude. 3. The government wants to know who to tax for the land. 4. Generally, we think the government's information should be publicly available, not hidden.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lxgr 3y ago1. is possible without knowing the owner’s identity – “public” (and maybe whether that means federal or state) and “private” seems to be enough. 2. breaks down when you consider rentals. A tenant might be legally allowed to deny access to a landlord in some circumstances. Tenants are usually not registered in property registers. For 3., how does the information for taxation have to be public? The government also needs to know my pay history to tax me, and that’s not public either. 4. if it’s the government’s information about me, should I really get absolutely no say in how it’s published?
- pixl97 3y ago>4. if it’s the government’s information about me, should I really get absolutely no say in how it’s published? This is not the governments information about you... This is the 'publics' information about you and who owns property in their communities. Stop thinking of the government as some kind of corporation, and instead the executive will of the populace itself.
- jedberg 3y agoFor #1, just knowing it is private isn't enough. I may have a claim to the land, and need to know who owns it. For example it's really handy to know who owns the land that borders mine. For #2, the owner is ultimately responsible. If there is a lease or any other contract, that is a civil matter. But all that matters to the police is who owns it. For #3, your income and taxes you pay should probably be public too. Why shouldn't they? In other countries it is public. And in America, if you work for the government, your income is public too. For #4, you do have a say. You can vote for people who will change the laws. For example, in some counties the ownership information is available online, but in many counties, it is not. You have to go into the county office to get the name and address of the owner.
- prepend 3y agoI don’t think the name is important for Zillow site visitors so they don’t publish it. The value and features are important. I imagine Zillow sells marketing databases with actual names. And of course you can just go to the county assessor to look up the name. But I don’t think Zillow even links to their source.
- cpursley 3y agoThey probably just get the info from data wholesalers who get it by scrapping government assessor databases (ATTOM, etc).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- a_square_peg 3y agoThe United States has a policy about government data - including weather (e.g. NOAA) and GPS, to be made freely available to the public. Your property data, collected at the county level, falls under this category so they are accessible to everyone. However, I think Zillow would be prevented from publishing the owner name, since it would probably be classified as Personal Identifiable Information (PII).
- Atotalnoob 3y agoIf you aren't following any regulations, PII can be published. You only have to worry about PII if you have to be compliant with a standard that prevents it.
- scarface_74 3y agoI just searched for my address on Google and the sixth link is from PropertyIQ and shows my name and my wife’s name as owners.
- dan-robertson 3y agoWell the tax assessment is public probably so that people can see that the government is acting honestly. I don’t know if there’s a particularly good reason for ownership to be public. Some countries only have transaction dates/prices but not names published. Some countries make everyone’s individual tax returns publicly available. I don’t know why the us found this particular balance. I assume that Zillow would get a load of angry emails if they published ownership information and it isn’t worth enough to them to publish it.
- benlivengood 3y agoWhy wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full transparency of real estate ownership and transactions. My fear is that otherwise we'll revert to de facto feudalism where the wealthiest entities can acquire and lease out virtually all real property. [0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11957208/near-1-billion-land-purchase-around-california-air-base-under-investigation https://www.kqed.org/news/11957208/near-1-billion-land-purch...
- beebmam 3y agoWhy should real estate have MORE stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than stock ownership?
- tomtheelder 3y agoIt shouldn’t, but real estate disclosure isn’t the problem there.
- pc86 3y agoThis is an argument to make stock ownership more public, not to make real estate ownership less public.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhy should stock ownership have LESS stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than real estate?
- j33zusjuice 3y agoFunny how often we allow shitty practices in one area because we already allow shittier practices in another. Why not have good policies instead of accepting bullshit all the time?
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- rawgabbit 3y agoCriminals have for decades anonymously hidden ill-gotten gains in real estate, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in March, adding that as much as $2.3 billion was laundered through U.S. real estate between 2015 and 2020. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-set-unveil-long-awaited-crackdown-real-estate-money-laundering-2023-08-10/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-set-unveil-long-awaited-...
- postingawayonhn 3y agoProbably the biggest reason would be so that when you buy a property you can independently confirm the vendor actually owns it.
- kshahkshah 3y agoThat’s what title is for
- postingawayonhn 3y agoI'm not totally familiar with the system/s in the US, but where I'm from (New Zealand) title records are publicly available to anyone for the payment of a USD $4 fee per property.
- kshahkshah 3y agoOur system is antiquated and only really exists because of lobbyists. Some stans will try to pretend there is some value add, there isn't.
- ars 3y agoIn general property that is owned via registration (land, domain names, copyright, trademark, patents) has public ownership listing. While property that is owned by possession (i.e. you are holding it) does not.
- kanbara 3y agoyou want your ownership of multiple properties that you dont contribute value to but earn equity in on the backs of renters to be private so you don’t get spam? or is there another reason?
- scarface_74 3y agoYes because everyone should own their home and landlords shouldn’t exist?
- izend 3y agoIn Canada the MLS Canada and title ownership is gated by realtors and expensive fees which gives them all the power to control the narrative.
- noarchy 3y agoIn my Canadian town the owners of a given property and the taxes they pay are available to the public. But indeed that doesn't mean we have access to sale prices, which are often very different from assessed values for purposes of taxation.
- morkalork 3y agoThis. My municipality you can look up any property but they do rate limit you. It's interesting when you pass by an old looking farm house, look it up, and see it was built in the 1790s!
- oaiey 3y agoLand property ownership is a very strong and very old form of ownership. Lot of countries the property registries have survived wars, regime changes, civil wars and 100s of years of dispute between neighbors. When not public, this would surely not work or would not be accepted. In my country looking up the registry costs like $25 ... So mass exploitation is not really that easy
- blatzguzzler 3y agoLawyer here. Land ownership has to be public because the only way to establish your right to property is the publicly recorded and government maintained "chain of title": who you are, who you got it from, who they got it from, etc., going back to the original survey of your state (or at least 50 years, where I am). Otherwise it would be chaos with everyone waiving around 100-year-old bogus deeds claiming the right to kick you out of your house. Tax records too, as someone else mentioned - everyone can verify whether or not the assessed tax is valid and the property valuation isn't made up to punish you for stepping on the toes of some county official. There are ways to obfuscate the individuals who actually own a particular piece of land (trusts, LLCs and such), but the chain of title needs to be available to anyone.
- bartchamdo 3y agoI disagree, why can’t land ownership be in sealed documents much like court documents can be sealed? It’s still registered as before but the documents are available to just anyone anytime without reason and they stay out of the clutches of the sleazy data dealers and such that get my address this way and send me junk and harass me in other ways. Obfuscation past this would still be possible as you said but the default should be privacy to the owner.
- drekipus 3y agoYes, that's definitely what we need this day and age, more secrecy.
- StopHammoTime 3y agoBecause ultimately, the reason could be made up. ANYONE could say they want to purchase the property and make an enquiry anyway. People can always lie or come up with fantastical stories. The problem is the baby is being thrown out with the bath water. The solution is good, the modern pillaging of the data is not.
- figassis 3y agoThe government should have no responsibility in facilitating land deals. If you want to buy land, buy it from the markets, and if the owner has not listed it, then likely they don’t want to sell it. And if you really want to buy it and think maybe if I just show them how much I’m willing to pay for it they’d sell, but they still haven’t listed it and you don’t know anyone that knows the owner, either tough luck or hire a private investigator. The government should only be involved in the ownership transfer process after a sale has been made. If you go to the government and ask about a piece of land, they should only be able to tell you if it’s owner by someone or by the state itself. If the latter, then you can buy it from them. Everything else seems like it exists due to lobbying.
- abathur 3y agoSo that private interests can figure out how to do exactly that--contact the owner of property they'd like to own or drill on or obtain water from or get an easement through or put wind turbines on? Edit: blatguzzler's sounds more foundational.
- crtified 3y agoNew Zealand recently had a minor controversy, where Owner (names) public datasets were used by third parties to create a searchable "What (else) Does My Landlord Own?" -style website, riding on a current of anti-rich-landlord sentiment in the midst of that countrys rising property price issues. That happening raised discussion similar to this, and sparked the governments land data department to investigate the suitability of allowing public access to such data. Ultimately, so far, they have decided to keep the status quo - the data is available, but its usage is governed by reference to overarching Privacy legislation, which defines acceptable privacy standards and gives a legal pathway for abuse to be prosecuted. Incidentally: due to many rental properties being owned in the name of private Trusts, Mom-n-Pop shell companies, and the like, a simple search by person-name only provides a partial result anyway, in this context. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/300959378/illfated-website-highlighted-antiinvestor-sentiment-representatives-say https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/money/300959378/illfated-we...
- cykros 3y agoAnd you've hit the nail on the head with that last sentence. Want a modicum of privacy? Set up a trust. The trust's ownership will be out there, but your involvement will not. You'll probably still get all the junk mail though. It'll just be more obviously bogus.
- gumby 3y agoI just use a corporation, which is simple to set up. Some journalist could track it down, but random spammers and such have no idea. You don't have to set up the company in your home state either. You can use one of the states with more privacy (e.g WY).
- cowsandmilk 3y ago> You can use one of the states with more privacy (e.g WY). Less effective than you might think because you will be required to register as a foreign corporation in the state where the property is located. That registration will expose exactly the same information as just setting up the company in that state.
- gumby 3y agoIf the company doesn’t “operate” in a state you don’t need to register as a foreign corporation. For example in California, the sec of state’s website says, Before transacting intrastate business in California, the business must first qualify/register with the California Secretary of State online at bizfileOnline.sos.ca.gov. "Transacting intrastate business" is defined as entering into repeated and successive transactions of its business in this state, other than interstate or foreign commerce. I.e. you can own, but not manage property through the corp.
- everybodyknows 3y ago> Zillow ... publish all other information about the property and its history? Among the info published are photos taken when the property was last on the market for sale. It's possible for the new owner to register as such, ask for and be notified by Zillow that the photos have been taken down. Owner may then discover some months later that the photos are back online again.
- Spooky23 3y agoYou need a public ledger of land ownership, it’s a public benefit. Otherwise, title and ownership of land always be an open question. How do you know some lienholder doesn’t have title to property without a public register?
- dragonwriter 3y ago> why is this information publicly published by every county in the US To make fraudulent sales and confusion about real property ownership less likely.