Deed

Everything else in the public record describes, encumbers or disputes what a deed established. That primacy is why deed quality gates everything downstream: a mis-read grantor/grantee pair silently inverts an ownership graph, which is why ingestion here fails closed when a source changes its column layout rather than guessing at a mapping.

Deeds are also where sales history comes from. A recorded consideration with a date is a fact about a transaction; strung together, deeds give a building’s trading history and an owner’s acquisition sequence, the raw material of both comps and assemblage detection.

What the record actually contains

Grantor

The party giving up the interest. Estates, trustees and referees appear here in distress situations, and the grantor line often tells the story.

Grantee

The party receiving it. When this is an LLC, the ownership question has only moved, not ended.

Consideration

The stated price. Nominal amounts ($0, $10) usually mean an intra-family or intra-entity transfer rather than a sale.

Legal description

The parcel, described in whichever scheme the jurisdiction uses. This is the field our matching reconciles.

Recorded date

When the county accepted it. Distinct from the execution date, and the one that governs priority.

Jurisdiction notes

In New York City, deeds record in ACRIS under a borough-block-lot; upstate they record with county clerks against tax-map parcels. New Jersey deeds record at county level and surface through state aggregation; Florida deeds record in each county’s Official Records index. Same instrument, four different addressing schemes.