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Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?

53 points by ginkoutest ↗ HN
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?

94 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] thread
LinuxBender
I 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
Trust, business, LLC, foundation, church.

There’s many options

uberman
I 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
Why 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
All 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
Yeah? 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
Only 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
Not 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.
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beardyw
Because people have been living in houses for millennia and such an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few decades.
13of40
In 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
<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
In 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
Computers 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.

wizofaus
I still remember those days quite clearly. Including the fact we virtually never got spam calls.
paleotrope
Local calls were free, long distance calls were not. The likelihood of spammer being in your local area was really really small.

The result of being able to call millions of people from anywhere in the country for essentially free is why we have spam calling.

wizofaus
I think it's fair to say in general the tele-comms industry has dropped the ball on ensuring phone calls are actually being used the way they were intended to. 80% of the calls I get I don't even bother picking up any more, and at least 70% of the SMS messages I get are phishing or spam.
furyofantares
I can't remember street addresses being included in the 90s. So maybe 4 or 5 decades ago for that?

Is a phonebook with just numbers that different than a facebook search, which afaik you can't opt out of? It feels like it is, but I think only because having a phone became a basic necessity. Structurally the phone network seems very similar to signing up for a social network and the phone book very similar to being able to search for other people.

vel0city
There were addresses in the books I got in the 90s and early 00's.
lxgr
The idea of a property register is much younger than a few millenia, though, so that's not a good argument for its default privacy level.

The United States are also younger than even a single millenium.

jltsiren
I would guess that the idea of a property register is about as old as the idea of formal land ownership. Ancient Rome definitely had property registers, and it was probably not their original idea. After all, maintaining records of land ownership for purposes such as taxation and military service was one of the core functions of many ancient states.
lxgr
Yes, but not all property registers in the world are public (or at least web-accessible).
Tagbert
Among the few documents that we have of the “dark ages” period in Anglo-Saxon Briton are the property deeds and grant documents. It gives us a little glimpse into the lives, politics, and language of the period that we would not have otherwise. Consider future historians before we hide more records needlessly.
Digory
1. 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.

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lxgr
1. 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
>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
For #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.

j33zusjuice
The public employee thing is irrelevant in this discussion. We get to see their salaries because we pay them. Whether or not salary should be public is a tough topic, imo. I can see it creating security concerns for some people who have enough to be targets of those who have very little while not having enough to pay for protection (i.e. most of the people who frequent this site, given IT workers are some of the best paid in the country).
jedberg
It's very relevant, because it shows that we already have a precedent for public salary disclosure.

And I'm not sure that concern is very warranted. You already know who gets paid a lot, because they live in nice houses in nice neighborhoods. Where they pay for protection through increased police presence due to their higher property taxes.

coder543
> Homesteading in the US (claiming public land as private land) only ended in 1986.

Is this a contributing factor to rising home prices? Maybe not, but it does seem weird that we no longer let people homestead public land.

Espressosaurus
I'm shocked it took that long. Just because it's held in the public trust doesn't mean we should allow someone to build a shanty on it to claim it.
prepend
I 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
They probably just get the info from data wholesalers who get it by scrapping government assessor databases (ATTOM, etc).
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a_square_peg
The 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
If 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
I 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
Well 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
Why 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-purch...

beebmam
Why should real estate have MORE stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than stock ownership?
tomtheelder
It shouldn’t, but real estate disclosure isn’t the problem there.
pc86
This is an argument to make stock ownership more public, not to make real estate ownership less public.
kwhitefoot
Why should stock ownership have LESS stringent requirements on ownership disclosure than real estate?
j33zusjuice
Funny 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?
beebmam
Is your argument that everyone's assets should be public information? How do you square this with people interested in blackmail, or abusive families?
kyawzazaw
What do you think about Norway's public salary record?
cykros
Significant stock ownership is pretty public through 8k forms. The SEC doesn't require reporting every trade of a few million dollars because it generally doesn't make a difference anyway. And you CAN access time and sales data in most brokerage platforms to see the size of many of those trades. The big exception there being those done on dark pools.

And while perhaps you could argue against dark pools, most would agree that illiquidity is a bad thing in markets. Dark pools do a good job of addressing this allowing for large positions to be massaged into a market they'd otherwise disrupt fairly heavily.

vlovich123
Why should disclosure be forced upon the vast majority of people at significant harm when you can enforce disclosure only if you own more than X properties or some % of an area?
Tagbert
What is the significant harm that is being forced on vast numbers by open records? I could see harm to a small number of people but for the true “vast” number, there is no impact.
vlovich123
The amount of spam and scam that starts heading your way when you purchase a house is insane.
Tagbert
Most of that drops off after the first year and then you just get the usual volume of spam. I keep a recycling bin near the front door for fast triage. Many days it all goes into the bin.
philipwhiuk
Maybe we should fix that rather than the disclosures?
snapplebobapple
You are very wrong on your analysis of the travis afb land purchase. You would be correct if someone could easily get into their entire land position they need for their project all at once but it never happens that way, you are always legging into positions and run the risk of massive extortion if what you are doing is known because holdouts can capture excess payouts due to their monopoly power. Secrecy is required to get a deal done otherwise no deals get done due to landowner greed.
hgs3
> holdouts can capture excess payouts

Isn't that capitalism working as intended? If you have a desirable asset then why shouldn't you charge more for it?

figassis
It is, and so is secrecy. Capitalism does not require publishing every business dealing. Capitalism is not just competition between a buyer and a seller, it is also between buyers and between sellers. Sellers with better access to info win, but access to info is not a property of capitalism.

That being said, while capitalism should definitely be regulated, I actually don’t think land ownership needs to be public bc I don’t think it will stop feudalism. I can buy however much land I want whether you know it or not.

snapplebobapple
No, that is exercising market power and it causes dead weight loss (basically the worst thing that can happen in economics). When you have a project that needs x amount of land the project is a go as long as the cost of everything is less than the present value of the expected profits. The spread between the cost and the expected payout should be whittled away to a small number in an efficient market. In an inefficient market with market power that is whittled away to potentially zero by holdouts abusing their position to get extra payout far in advance of the value of their land. The efficient market results in lower end costs and more stuff for us all, which is pretty much always a benefit to society. The inefficient market costs us output and makes us all worse off.

Since you are legging into the real estate the secrecy pretty much always gets you closer to the efficient outcome rather then transparency because the efficient outcome has the land purchased at the current value, not the value based on market power abuse from knowing what the future private development plan for the land is.

hgs3
The buyer is the one giving the market power to the seller. If the buyer did not have interest in the land and did not buy the surrounding land, then the seller would not have power. It is not the sellers fault if the buyers project fails because they couldn't budget for the "inefficient market" they themselves created. Calling this "abuse" is sour grapes.
snapplebobapple
Wow, that is a very tortured re-imagining of reality. The buyer in this case needs a certain amount of land at a certain price to make their project make sense. If that amount of land is larger than the average size of land for sale, then they have to leg into the total land purchase by buying chunks of land over time until they have amalgamated their total land requirement. It is entirely the seller's fault because they are the ones demanding a very large markup on the previous fair market value of their land because they know the buyer has already spent millions to hundreds of millions and will potentially lose their shirt if the project fails. This is the textbook definition of market power abuse. The end result of which is an artificial limitation on projects that need more than the average amount of land for sale, less output from society and all of us being poorer for it. Also, you can't really budget for this kind of abuse because the seller is taking into account what they think you budgeted and trying to capture all of it. It's a death spiral for large projects playing that game and it's why some decent secrecy is needed in situations like these. There is no situation where a land owner getting a large payout for holding out is a good thing for society.
hgs3
The price of a good is not a constant. It doesn't matter whether it's land, gold, stocks, rent, or trading cards. Prices change. Buyers are never entitled to the "previous fair market value" of anything.
benlivengood
The simple answer is that acquiring large tracts of land isn't tractable in established areas. It requires forceful taking of some parcels or extravagant expense. Eminent domain allows the government to accomplish infrastructure projects at a (somewhat) reasonable cost but there's no expectation that private entities can achieve the same thing.
postingawayonhn
Probably the biggest reason would be so that when you buy a property you can independently confirm the vendor actually owns it.
kshahkshah
That’s what title is for
postingawayonhn
I'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
Our system is antiquated and only really exists because of lobbyists. Some stans will try to pretend there is some value add, there isn't.
kanbara
you 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
Yes because everyone should own their home and landlords shouldn’t exist?
Detrytus
Yes. Also: everyone should be forever young and handsome...
izend
In 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
In 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
This. 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!
ars
In 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.
oaiey
Land 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
Lawyer 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
I 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
Yes, that's definitely what we need this day and age, more secrecy.
StopHammoTime
Because 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
The 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.

philipwhiuk
"from the markets"

How do you know the person you are buying it from actually owns it.

figassis
This is a solved problem. How to you buy a car from someone?
dragonwriter
> This is a solved problem

Sure, but the solution that makes it a “solved problem” is—exactly—what is used now.

> How to you buy a car from someone?

Governments make publicly available title records by VIN for cars. If you are financing a car, the financer will probably insist on verifying it just as the person financing your home purchase will want similar verification.

If you aren't financing it (more likely with cars than real estate) maybe you won't do any verification first, accept a pink slip or deed at face value, and file the required paperwork with the government to record the transfer, accepting more risk.

EDIT: But even if you are doing it without financing, the risk profile is different: an expensive car is a cheap plot of land, which makes the opportunity for profit from fraudulently selling real estate to people who are willing not to independently verify title a lot greater per act than with cars. There's a reason that the saying is “If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.” and not “... a car to sell you.”

cykros
If your tree falls on my house, I need to know who to sue for damages. If your failure to adequately look after drainage causes flood conditions, same. Insert any number of ways your property could cause damage to the person or property of another and you have a valid reason for why its ownership information needs to be public.
abathur
So 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
New 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-we...

cykros
And 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
I 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
> 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
If 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
> 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
You 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
> why is this information publicly published by every county in the US

To make fraudulent sales and confusion about real property ownership less likely.