01Glossary

Public-records terms, in plain English.

The vocabulary the county recorder uses, what each term actually means, and why it changes the answer to who owns this building.

02Conveyance

Deed: The recorded instrument that transfers title. It names a grantor and a grantee and is the backbone of any ownership chain — everything else describes or encumbers what a deed established.
Grantor / grantee: The party giving up an interest and the party receiving it. Mis-mapping these two columns silently inverts an entire ownership graph, which is why our ingestion fails closed when a source changes its header layout.
Consideration: The stated amount paid. Often nominal on intra-family or intra-entity transfers, which is itself a signal worth noticing.

03Debt

Mortgage: A recorded lien securing a loan against the property. The recorded amount is the original principal, not the current balance — a distinction a lot of analysis gets wrong.
Assignment: A recorded transfer of an existing mortgage to a new holder. Following assignments is how you learn who actually holds the debt today, which is frequently not the originating bank.
Satisfaction: A recorded discharge stating a mortgage has been paid off. Without tracking these, a capital stack accumulates loans that no longer exist.

04Encumbrance

Mechanic’s lien: A claim recorded by a contractor or supplier for unpaid work on the property. Small in dollars, often large in meaning — it usually indicates a project in trouble.

05Distress

Lis pendens: Latin for "suit pending". A recorded notice that litigation affecting title has begun. Frequently the earliest public sign that something has gone wrong.
Foreclosure filing: The formal start of proceedings to force a sale over unpaid debt. A process rather than an event — the filing, the judgment and the sale can be years apart.
Tax delinquency: Unpaid property tax. Depending on jurisdiction it can lead to a lien sale or a tax deed, and it is often the cheapest available signal of owner distress.

06Ownership

UBO: Ultimate beneficial owner — the natural person who actually controls an asset held through one or more companies. In the United States there is no public filing that states it, which is the entire reason behavioural inference exists.
Registered agent: The party designated to receive legal service for a company. Useful as a behavioural signal, dangerous as an identity: a single commercial agent fronts thousands of unrelated entities, so any inference from it must be capped.
Assemblage: Adjacent parcels accumulating under common control, usually through separate entities. Public in every deed, invisible without resolution.
Shell / holding company: An entity that holds an asset without operating a business. Legal and extremely common — the point is not that shells are suspicious, but that they hide the person who decides.

07Identifier

BBL: Borough-block-lot, New York City’s parcel identifier. One of many mutually incompatible identifier schemes the resolver has to reconcile to a single canonical property.
Parcel ID / APN: The assessor’s parcel number. Unique within a jurisdiction and routinely not unique outside it, which is a classic source of cross-county collisions.
Condo unit vs building: A separately deeded condominium unit is its own parcel. Counting units as buildings inflates portfolio sizes dramatically, so our figures are stated as parcels.
Rune ID: Mimir’s own identifier: the one id the Rune Engine assigns to every building and every resolved owner. Every record we hold for it — deeds, mortgages, tax rolls — resolves to that id, so you cite a building, not a spreadsheet row, and it travels on exports.

08Method

Provenance: The chain of pointers from a value on screen back to the government record that produced it. Carried per field here, not per report.
Deterministic resolution: Matching that is a fixed function of its inputs: the same records always produce the same canonical id, so results are reproducible and auditable rather than drifting between runs. Inside Mimir, the machine that does this is the Rune Engine.
The Eye: Mimir’s precision standard: random samples of ownership answers, hand-checked against the underlying documents and adjudicated by more than one reviewer before an answer family ships.

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