Every property in the country has a paper trail. Who owns it, what they paid, what they owe, what is wrong with it, and whether anyone has taken them to court over it. Almost all of it is public, most of it is free, and the investors who win off-market are the ones who know which office holds which piece.
The catch is that no single office holds the whole picture. Ownership lives with the county assessor. The deed and any liens live with the recorder. Code cases live with the city. Probate and foreclosure live with the courts. Delinquent taxes live with the treasurer. Five agencies, five systems, none of them talking to each other, and none built for you.
Public records in real estate are the government-held documents that describe a property and its owner: ownership and assessed value from the county assessor, deeds and liens from the recorder, code violations from the city, probate and foreclosure filings from the courts, and tax status from the treasurer. Together they tell you who to contact, why they might sell, and what it will take to close.
I'm Skyler Bissell. I invest off-market out of Seattle, and I built FlaggedLeads because assembling this trail by hand across dozens of county and city systems is the actual work of finding deals. This guide is the map of what exists, where it lives, and what each record is good for.
The five records that matter
Here is the whole landscape on one screen. Everything below expands on these.
| Record | Held by | What it tells you | Typical access |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parcel / assessment record | County assessor | Owner name, tax-billing address, assessed value, year built, lot size, sale history | Free online portal |
| Deed, mortgage, lien | County recorder / auditor | Chain of title, who financed it, recorded liens and judgments | Free to search, small fee per copy |
| Code violation / enforcement case | City or county code enforcement | Open cases, type, status, dates | Free portal, or a records request |
| Court filing | Superior / district court | Probate, divorce, eviction, foreclosure, bankruptcy | Free to online, some sealed |
| Tax record | County treasurer | Amounts owed, delinquency, tax-sale status | Free online portal |
Two of these tell you who to contact. Three of them tell you why they might sell. You need both halves.
1. Assessor records: ownership and the mailing address
The county assessor is where you start, because it answers the first question: who owns this, and where does their mail go?
Assessor records are public in every state. Pull a parcel by address and you get the owner of record, the assessed value, the year built, the lot size, and usually the sale history. The single most useful field is the tax-billing mailing address, because it is where the county sends the tax bill, which means it is an address the owner actually monitors. In our database the mailing address is populated on 98.5% of roughly 296,000 parcels. Owner name is public too, but the mailing address is the field that gets your letter opened.
That mailing address is also a distress signal in its own right. When it differs from the property address, the owner does not live there, and distance makes an off-market sale easier to consider. Across our seven Puget Sound markets, roughly 58% of scored distressed-property leads with a determinable ownership posture are absentee-owned. The full method for pulling ownership, and the trap that catches most people, is in how to find out who owns a property. Two cases branch off it: when the owner of record is an entity, finding the person behind an LLC takes a Secretary of State filing and a deed signature, and when the house is sitting empty, finding the owner of a vacant house works the city's code enforcement file as a second record. Only after those records run out does paying make sense, which is the case for skip tracing and the cases where you can skip it; if you are holding a whole export of addresses with no names, skip tracing by address only is the bulk version.
2. Recorder records: deeds, mortgages, and liens
The county recorder (called the auditor or clerk in some states) holds every document ever recorded against a property. This is the title trail.
What you can learn here: when the property last transferred and for how much, who holds the mortgage, and whether anyone has recorded a lien or judgment. A property with an old, small mortgage or none at all is a high-equity property, which changes what an owner can accept. A property buried in liens is a different conversation entirely. Code enforcement can record its own liens here too, which is how unpaid violation fines attach to title, covered in how code enforcement liens work.
The instrument type on each filing carries information too. A statutory warranty deed marks an arm's length sale; a quitclaim usually marks a family transfer, a divorce, or a move into a trust, and it typically records at $0. Quitclaim deed vs warranty deed covers what each one conveys and what the recorded data shows about them.
Recorder searches are free; certified copies usually cost a few dollars. The one skill worth building is reading the grantor-grantee index, because that is how you trace title backward through every owner.
3. Code enforcement records: condition and pressure
This is the record I built a company around, so I will keep it short and point you to the depth.
Code violations are the city's formal confirmation that something is wrong with a property. They are public, most large cities publish them on open data portals, and they are the strongest single condition-and-pressure signal in the public record. Type matters enormously: a vacant-building or land-use case points at a checked-out owner, while a construction case points at one actively improving the property.
- The full breakdown of types and what each signals is the building code violations guide.
- Whether your city publishes a portal or makes you file for it is tracked in code enforcement open data by city.
- The step-by-step lookup is how to look up code violations, and yes, code violations are public record everywhere.
Code enforcement is one of several property distress signals that live in public data, alongside fire incidents, 311 complaints, and expired permits. The signals guide covers how they stack.
4. Court records: probate, eviction, foreclosure
Court filings are where owner distress becomes a matter of public record.
Probate opens when an owner dies, and the estate often wants to sell an inherited house nobody in the family wants. Eviction filings flag a landlord who is done being a landlord. Foreclosure and pre-foreclosure filings mark an owner running out of time. Bankruptcy pulls all of it into federal court.
Most of these are searchable online through the county superior or district court, though some records are sealed and some counties still make you visit the clerk. The important thing to understand is timing. A foreclosure filing is a lagging indicator: by the time it records, the trouble has been building for a year and every investor with a subscription can see it. That is the whole argument for working leading versus lagging indicators, and why I lead with code and condition records instead of court filings.
5. Tax records: delinquency and the tax sale
The county treasurer holds the tax record: what is owed, what is late, and whether the property is heading for a tax sale.
Property-tax delinquency is a clean financial-distress signal, because the amounts are small relative to the asset and an owner who lets them slide is usually under real pressure. Delinquency lists are public, though the format ranges from a clean download to a clerk who reads you numbers over the phone. Like foreclosure, tax delinquency is a status that arrives after a deadline passes, so treat it as confirmation of distress rather than early warning.
How to actually access the records
Two paths, and you will use both.
The open data portal. The cleanest option when it exists. Assessor and treasurer records are almost always online. Many cities publish code enforcement, permits, and 311 on open data portals you can query or download in bulk. This is the path a tool like mine automates: pull daily, normalize the fields, join across sources.
The public records request. When a department has no usable portal and swears it "doesn't keep a list," you file a request under your state's public records law (the PRA in Washington, FOIA-style statutes elsewhere). The agency has to release the records regardless of whether it wants to. This is how you get past a stonewalling code office. The contrarian truth about where the big data vendors get their records, and why it is not a secret source, is in where property data tools get their data.
What it costs
Mostly nothing. Assessor, recorder, treasurer, and most court searches are free to look at online. You pay small per-copy fees for certified documents, occasional PRA fulfillment costs when a request is large, and per-record fees only when you buy from an aggregator instead of pulling the source yourself. The expensive part is never the data. It is the hours spent matching a name across five systems that each format the address differently, which is exactly the work most investors quit on.
Turning records into a lead list
A pile of records is not a lead list. The workflow that turns one into the other:
- Start with a condition or distress record (a code violation, a vacant-building case, a probate filing) to build the candidate list. This is the distress signals half.
- Add the assessor record to get the owner and the mailing address.
- Check the recorder and treasurer for equity and liens, so you know the property is worth pursuing.
- Join on a normalized address, not the raw string, or half your matches vanish.
- Rank and work the top. How this fits the broader off-market playbook is in how to find distressed properties.
If you would rather see the records already assembled and scored, the free FlaggedLeads map shows code violation locations and types across our live markets with no account required, and you can browse the data by neighborhood for Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma, Burien, and Pierce County.
Frequently asked questions
Are property records public?
Yes. Ownership and assessed value from the county assessor, deeds and liens from the recorder, tax status from the treasurer, and most court filings are public records in every state. Code violations are public too. A small subset of court records is sealed, and a few agencies charge copy or fulfillment fees, but the records themselves are open.
How do I find public records for a property for free?
Start with the county assessor's online portal, which gives you the owner, mailing address, and assessed value at no cost. Use the county recorder for deeds and liens, the treasurer for tax status, and the city's open data portal or code enforcement office for violations. All are free to search; you only pay small fees for certified copies.
What public records tell you a property owner might sell?
Condition and pressure records: open code violations, vacant-building cases, probate filings, eviction filings, tax delinquency, and pre-foreclosure notices. An out-of-state mailing address on the assessor record adds absentee ownership on top. The strongest leads carry several of these at once.
Do I need to pay a service to search public records?
Usually not. Aggregators package records you can pull yourself for free, which is convenient at volume but not a different source. The value a tool adds is normalizing and joining records across dozens of county and city systems, not access to a secret database.
What is the difference between assessor and recorder records?
The assessor values property and holds the current owner, mailing address, and assessed value, used for taxation. The recorder (or auditor) holds recorded documents: deeds, mortgages, and liens, which form the chain of title. You use the assessor to find who to contact and the recorder to understand equity and encumbrances.