Property data has a vocabulary, and almost nobody who buys it was taught the vocabulary. That is not a knowledge gap so much as a supply-chain artefact: these words were invented by county tax offices and title companies for their own purposes, then inherited wholesale by sales teams who needed the underlying facts for something completely different.
The result is a spreadsheet where every column has a name that sounds self-explanatory and half of them mean something other than what they appear to. This page defines the ones that matter to a list, and — more usefully — says what each one gets wrong when you filter on it.
Identity and location
Parcel
The unit of everything. A parcel is a defined piece of land with a boundary and an owner of record, and every other field on this page hangs off it. It is not a house: a parcel may hold one house, several buildings, or nothing at all, and a single house can straddle two parcels. If your list is meant to be one row per home, the parcel is where that assumption is most likely to break.
APN / PIN / parcel ID
The county’s identifier for the parcel, called the assessor’s parcel number in most of the west, the property index number around Chicago, and a dozen other things elsewhere. Formatting is local — dashes, leading zeros and segment counts all vary — so an APN that survived a trip through a spreadsheet has usually lost its leading zeros and no longer matches anything. Store it as text, always with the county.
Situs address
The physical location of the parcel. This is the address a rep drives to, and it is not always the address printed on any document about the property.
Mailing address
Where the tax bill goes. The comparison between situs and mailing is one of the highest-value operations in property data and costs nothing to run — it is the whole basis of finding absentee owners and of any filter that tries to separate occupants from landlords.
Owner of record
The name on the most recent recorded deed, as the county transcribed it. Four caveats travel with it. It can be an entity rather than a person. It can be a trust, in which case the human you want is not named at all. It reflects the county’s update schedule rather than reality. And the spelling is whatever the clerk typed, which is why name-based matching against it is so much worse than address-based matching. How to find out who owns a house covers working around each of those.
The transfer
Deed
The recorded instrument that moves an interest in the property from one party to another. A deed is evidence that a transfer happened; it is not evidence that money changed hands, that the property sold on the open market, or that anybody moved.
Grantor and grantee
Giver and receiver. Seller and buyer on a normal sale, and something else entirely on the transactions listed below.
Deed type
The single most under-read field in property data. The type tells you what kind of transfer you are looking at, and a list that treats every recorded deed as a sale will be wrong on a meaningful share of rows.
| Deed type | What it usually means | What a list gets wrong |
|---|---|---|
| Warranty deed / grant deed | An arm’s-length sale with title guarantees | Nothing much — this is the transfer you were looking for |
| Quitclaim deed | Whatever interest the grantor had, transferred without warranty — divorces, family transfers, cleanups | Reads as a sale, has no price, and often means the same household still lives there |
| Interspousal / trust transfer deed | Moving title between spouses or into a living trust | Produces a brand-new “owner” who is the same person, and resets any tenure field derived from transfer date |
| Trustee’s deed / sheriff’s deed | A foreclosure or forced sale | Grantee is frequently a lender or servicer, not a homeowner at all |
| Special warranty deed | Limited warranty, common in builder and institutional transfers | Often a new-construction handover rather than a resale |
The practical rule for anyone building a recently-sold list: filter on deed type before you filter on date, or your new-mover list will be seasoned with refinances and estate paperwork.
Recording date and transfer date
The transfer date is when the parties signed. The recording date is when the county wrote it down. They can differ by days or by months, and only one of them is in your file. Any “sold in the last 90 days” filter is really a filter on whichever of the two your source carries, offset by however long that county takes to publish.
Sale price / consideration
The amount recorded on the instrument. Meaningful on an arm’s-length sale, and meaningless or nominal on everything in the table above — a dollar, a hundred dollars, or blank. In a handful of non-disclosure states it is not recorded at all, and any price you see there is estimated by somebody.
Value, tax and equity
Assessed value
The value the county assigns for tax purposes. It follows state law, not the market: some states assess at a fixed fraction of market value, some cap annual increases, and some freeze the figure for long-tenured or senior owners. Comparing assessed values across state lines compares two different formulas.
Market value / AVM
An estimate of what the property would fetch today, produced by an automated valuation model. It is a calculated field, not a recorded one, and its error is much larger on unusual homes, rural parcels and areas with thin sales history. Treat it as a band, never a number.
Taxable value and exemptions
Assessed value after exemptions are applied — homestead, senior, veteran, agricultural. The exemption flags are worth more to a sales team than the value itself, because a homestead exemption is one of the few positive signals that the owner actually lives in the house.
Estimated equity
Market estimate minus outstanding loan estimate. Two estimates subtracted from each other, which means the errors add. It is a genuinely useful sorting signal and a bad qualifying threshold — see how to find high-equity homeowners for what the derivation actually rests on.
Loans and encumbrances
Mortgage / deed of trust
The recorded security instrument for a loan. It gives you the original amount, the date, the lender and the term. It does not give you the current balance — that is amortised, and nobody records payments — so every balance field in a property file is a projection from the original terms.
Lien
A claim recorded against the property: tax liens, mechanic’s liens, judgments. Presence is recorded; release is also recorded, and files that ingest one without the other show liens that were cleared years ago.
Open versus released
The status that decides whether a loan or lien still exists. If your source does not carry release records, its count of open mortgages is a count of mortgages ever taken out, which on a long-tenured home can be three or four.
The building itself
Characteristics — year built, square footage, bedrooms, stories, roof material, pool — come from the assessor’s file, which was compiled for taxation and updated when something triggered a reassessment. That matters more than it sounds: a field like roof material may describe the roof at the time of the last permit or the last physical inspection, whichever the county last bothered with. Nobody records roof age at all, which is the entire subject of how to find homes with old roofs.
Land use and property class are the county’s own taxonomy for what a parcel is, and the codes are local. The same single-family home can carry a different class code on either side of a county line, and the case and spelling of the label itself varies. Any filter written against a class code needs to be written per county or against a normalised version of it.
Five words that are not what they sound like
- Owner-occupied. Almost never observed. It is derived, usually from situs matching mailing, occasionally from a homestead exemption. It is an inference wearing the clothes of a fact.
- Absentee. The same inference, negated. It groups landlords, snowbirds, heirs and people who simply have mail sent to the office.
- Last sale date. Frequently the last recorded transfer of any kind, including the ones that were not sales.
- Length of residence. Usually time since the last transfer, which is not the same as how long the household has lived there, and is reset by a trust transfer.
- Household. Whatever the source’s clustering rule decided. It is a modelling choice, and it is where two people at the same address become one row or two.
Every item on that list is a derived field, and the difference between a derived field and a recorded one is the difference between a list that performs and a list that surprises you. Homeowner data fields explained sorts the person-side fields the same way.
How to use this when a vendor sends a sample
Take the sample file, pick the six columns your filters actually depend on, and ask the vendor one question about each: was this recorded, or was it derived, and from what. The answers you get in writing are worth more than the sample itself, because they tell you which of your filters are reading facts and which are reading somebody’s model.
Disclosure: Scout Data sells property and homeowner data, so this glossary is written by an interested party. We have tried to be useful about the failure modes rather than flattering about ours — our filters read the same imperfect county records everyone else’s do, and the difference is in whether the derivation is disclosed. If you are evaluating providers, List Builder is the product this vocabulary describes, and best skip tracing software covers the contact side of the same purchase.
Frequently asked questions
What is an APN?
The assessor’s parcel number — the identifier a county assigns to a piece of land so it can be taxed. It is the closest thing property data has to a primary key, and it is only unique inside the county that issued it. Two counties in the same state can and do issue the same string, which is why a bare APN with no county attached is not an identifier at all.
What is the difference between a situs address and a mailing address?
The situs address is where the property physically is. The mailing address is where the county sends the tax bill. When they match, the owner probably lives there. When they diverge, you are looking at a rental, a second home, an owner who moved, or a manager collecting mail for a portfolio — four very different sales conversations that one field comparison separates.
Is assessed value the same as market value?
No, and treating them as interchangeable is the most expensive glossary error in this list. Assessed value exists to allocate tax and is set by a formula that varies by state, sometimes deliberately held below market and sometimes frozen by an exemption. Market value is an estimate of what the property would sell for. In some states they run close together; in others assessed value is a fraction of market and moves on a schedule that has nothing to do with prices.
Who are the grantor and the grantee on a deed?
The grantor gives the interest away and the grantee receives it. On an ordinary sale the grantor is the seller and the grantee is the buyer. The useful habit is to read them as roles rather than as people, because the same names appear in both columns across a refinance, a transfer into a trust, or a divorce — transactions that look like sales in a list and are not.