The Case of Those Pesky Real Estate Records

I Would Have Gotten Away with It if Hadn’t Been for those Meddling Kids

Steven Robinson (not his real name) sits at present, in a federal penitentiary. Re-runs of Scooby Doo on the prison TV bring him no mirth. Mr. Robinson (not his real name) lived a charmed life. He rose the corporate ladder, achieving a vaunted C-Suite position. His Instagram accounts were testimony to his lavish lifestyle. He did not expect anyone to suspect more. He was comfortable that they believed his marketing savvy produced it all. He had been entrusted with multi-million dollar budgets, and if some of those dollars went to real estate in Florida and California, who would know? Delaware limited liability companies are pretty leak-proof. You can almost hear Mr. Robinson (not his real name) cursing those meddling kids.

The Irregular Blogger Comes Again

How those kids got Mr. Robinson reminds us of two well-worn lessons, and it gives us an excuse to sound off on an additional topic:

·       The addresses, Chico, they never lie

·       Big Data is your friend

·       Nothing beats real estate, even if it can be torture to research

The addresses, Chico, they never lie

As a budding open-source researcher, you need to know one incontrovertible, undisputed tenet: addresses. They are your best friend. People are fearful of their social security numbers cascading around the dark web. But it is their address, so plainly visible on their front doors, which may unlock many secrets. As we dig for information, addresses matter greatly to us for two reasons. First, as just stated, addresses are freely given. They are easy to find. The basest, worst Internet people finder sites will have your address. Second, everything has your address. Secretary of State documents, vehicle registrations, Uniform Commercial Code filings, all contain addresses. This means all sorts of public records can be found via an address. Regardless of the name you put on an asset, if it has your address, we can find it. Your real estate owned through a secret Delaware limited liability company, we can find it because the tax bill is sent to an address we can find.

Big Data is your friend

There was once a promise—that this blog would show up weekly. Filled with tips and tricks and resources to help you be the best OSINT-er out there. Instead, it now comes out about once a month, and thus, often carries this ever-present message: Big Data is your friend. Too often you hear researchers and investigators besmirch Big Data. It didn’t have the record I needed. It was wrong. It’s not a report. Big Data, such as the comprehensive reports from Lexis, Accurint, TLO, etc., can be inaccurate. They do not contain all relevant records despite including words like “comprehensive” in their titles. They are tools and nothing more. So if someone slaps a cover page on a Big Data report and calls it due diligence, it is worth damning. But none of that should get in your way. Big Data is the best way to find addresses because it draws from the most sources.  There is more information in Big Data because there are less ways people can opt out or remove their data the way they can from run-of-the mill open-source people finders. Mr. Robinson’s Big Data report included the address that provided the lead for those meddling kids that put an end to his corporate chicanery.

Nothing beats real estate records, even if it’s torture to research

Once the meddling kids had the addresses listed in Big Data, it was a matter of time until they put them in databases of real estate records. It was there that they found indicators of unknown real estate. Additional searches of these real estate records produced documents. Incriminating documents with secret Delaware LLCs and the not so secret signatures of Mr. Robinson (not his real name).

In this matter, finding the real estate and obtaining the supporting documents went fast. The culprit went and bought his fancy house in a county where real estate records are easy to search, and the related documents easy to get. Had he thought about it, he could have picked many places in the USA where it would have been harder for those meddling kids.

There are no public records in the United States more public that real estate records. You may say court, litigation records, but I would counter and point out so many of those are getting sealed these days. We need real estate records to be public. We need public registries of land to ensure clean title transfers. We need public registries of land in case something happens on the land. We also make certain land-related records public to protect lenders and preserve priorities. These are public records. Use them. Not just to show assets or liabilities. But to show relationships. To identify her husband, his wife. And many other hidden relationships. If they were not so hard to research.

A good friend and colleague gave me some honest feedback on a recent blog post: write shorter pieces. Alas, I cannot help myself. I am in love with my Scooby Do references; the world of OSINT is never as simple as some would like it. Real estate searching is complicated and cumbersome and difficult for reasons I can enumerate at length. I was advised to make things shorter.

Real estate records are a pain to search for at least these reasons. One, they are written in a language meant to assuage a law school graduate. Real estate records contain words found nowhere else in the English language. If someone mentioned to a normal person that property was alienated, would you think anything besides ET? Two, from a public record perspective, there are almost always two sets of records. Tax assessment records, which are not really property records, contain much valuable information, and recorder’s records or grantor/grantee indices or, see above, are often called something else, where you need to search. Third, the query processes to search for them are mostly cumbersome and time-consuming. Fourth, you may not be looking at the right record.

Keep it short. I’m not going to detail the difficulties of searching real estate records. I will instead provide some background and overview. To locate real estate records one can use online subscription databases or one can access the records via the relevant county’s website. Don’t AT me, but I believe every county in the USA has a public internet site for their real estate records. The advantage of subscription databases: faster, ability to search tax assessment and grantor/grantee records at the same time, and the results come summarized and ordered for you. The problem is, where you need the other, the records are limited. You cannot find Mr. Robinson’s signature on an online abstract.

You always want to search at the county level. It has all the records. They’re usually up to date but often a pain in the ass to navigate. How ever many counties there are in the US, there are almost as many software packages for searching real estate records. And there are other nuances and roadblocks. Like a name can be listed in grantor/granted records, once with a middle name and once without, and the same search won’t find both records. If the system allows searching by parcel number, PIN, or the equivalent you can bypass name problems, but not all systems do that. If you are searching in Los Angeles County, you will find no documents available from the Internet. Have I mentioned that mortgages are often indexed as MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration System and not by Chase or Citi or Chili Palmer? That rarely can you copy and paste from real estate documents to other places. It is just not easy or quick.

Did I keep it short?  Feel free to ask me any pressing questions on how to find real estate records. Just remember to use that address, and not just the name, to get the good stuff. And Big Data is your friend.