Anatomy of a lien history: four documents, one loan
I have watched a $12M building read as $40M of debt because someone summed four documents that describe one loan. Here is how loans actually live in the county index, and how we untangle them.
Pull the mortgage index on a building you know and count the instruments. A well-traded multifamily asset carries a paper stack several times deeper than its actual debt: originations, assignments, modifications, consolidations, satisfactions, the odd correction deed. Every vendor selling “total recorded debt” has quietly decided how to turn that pile into a number. Most decide badly, and none of them show you the decision.
The four-document loan
Here is the shape that breaks naive pipelines. A loan is originated in 2019. In 2021 the originating bank sells the paper and an assignment records. In 2023 it is sold again. Another assignment, this time to a party that appears nowhere on the original instrument. In 2024 the borrower and the current holder agree to a modification. That is four documents describing one obligation. Sum them and you have invented three phantom loans, and a building with $12M of real debt reads as $40M+.
The reverse failure is quieter and worse. Satisfactions, the filings that discharge a loan, are recorded on their own schedule, sometimes sloppily, and they reference the original instrument, not your tidy summary of it. Miss the linkage and a loan paid off in 2018 haunts the building forever. A stack that never retires anything makes every clean building look levered, and a vendor that never shows its linkage work can never be caught doing it.
Resolution, pointed at instruments
Mimir treats the debt problem as the same problem as identity, because it is. The instruments carry references to each other the way records carry evidence about parties: imperfectly, in whatever format the county used that decade. Assembling a position means resolving those references deterministically: this assignment attaches to this origination, this satisfaction discharges it, this modification supersedes that amount. The output is one position per real obligation, at the amount that is still operative, with the full document trail attached.
- A discharged loan stops counting the day its satisfaction resolves.
- An assigned loan shows its current holder of record, the party you would actually call.
- Every line in the stack links to the instruments behind it, in order.
What we will not pretend to know
A recorded mortgage states its original principal. It does not state the balance. Amortization is not filed anywhere public, and no vendor pulling county records knows what is left on a loan. We print the recorded figure with its recorded date, labeled as exactly that. Where a vendor shows you a “current balance” from public records, you are looking at a model wearing a document’s clothes.
The honest version of debt data is a history, not a number: 8.0M recorded mortgages, assignments and satisfactions, each resolved into the position it belongs to, each one click from its paper.
That history is also where the interesting signals live. A satisfaction with no new mortgage behind it is an owner deleveraging. An assignment into a debt fund is paper moving toward a workout desk. A modification recorded eighteen months before maturity is a borrower already negotiating. None of that is visible in a summary. All of it is visible in the trail.