Why “9.2 million owners unmasked” would be a lie
Our own database offered us a headline number ten times bigger than the one we publish. It was technically true and completely misleading. We threw it away. Most vendors would not have.
While preparing the figures for this site I ran the obvious query: how many properties resolve to an ultimate human controller? The database said 10.1 million. That number is real. It is reproducible. And as a marketing claim about unmasking, it is a lie.
hops = 0
The resolved chain for every property records how many entities sit between the deed and the person. And for 9.20M of those properties, the answer is zero: the deed simply names a human being. A house owned by the family that lives in it. No shell, no veil, nothing to pierce. Calling that “unmasking” is like a locksmith billing you for opening an unlocked door.
Strip the zero-hop rows and the defensible figure is 961K properties across New York and Florida whose deed names a company and whose route to a person. 486K distinct controllers behind 387K companies, is actually built, hop by hop, each hop scored and cited. That is the number on this site. It is four times smaller than the one we could technically defend in a footnote, and it is the only one that describes the thing you would be buying.
Why publish the mistake we almost made
Because the inflated version of this number is not hypothetical. Inflation is the default grammar of this industry. Counts of “owners identified” that include deeds that name the owner. National coverage claims built on states with a tax roll and nothing else. “Beneficial ownership” datasets that are registry reprints with no behavioral resolution at all. None of these are exactly false. All of them are constructed so you cannot tell what you are buying until after you have bought it.
We would rather show the query. Every figure on this site carries an as-of date and a measurement definition, and the strict-counting rule (hops ≥ 1, covered states only, never a negative claim about ground we have not covered) is written into the site’s own build checks. The claim registry fails the build if a number appears that no measurement backs.
The general rule
- A countable number can still be a misleading number. Countability is not honesty.
- The denominator is where marketing lies live. Always ask what was excluded, and why.
- If a vendor’s headline figure would shrink under a stricter definition, ask for the stricter figure. The speed of the answer tells you most of what you need.
The moat is not the big number. The moat is being able to publish the small one and explain, in public, exactly why it is smaller.