[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
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Ask HN: Why is home property information so public?
I get a lot of letters in the mail, texts, and phone calls from
real estate investors trying to buy one of my rental properties. I
know they found my info by checking county assessor offices, but
why is this information publicly published by every county in the
US? I recognize that this data is super valuable, particularly to
brokers and wholesalers, so I'm curious why websites like Zillow
don't also publish the name of the owner of a property, yet they
publish all other information about the property and its history?
Author : ginkoutest
Score : 30 points
Date : 2023-09-03 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
| Digory wrote:
| 1. The Public needs to know if they are permitted to be at a
| place or not. Or even if they can claim it. Homesteading in the
| US (claiming public land as private land) only ended in 1986.
|
| 2. Because police need to know who belongs at a place, and who to
| exclude.
|
| 3. The government wants to know who to tax for the land.
|
| 4. Generally, we think the government's information should be
| publicly available, not hidden.
| lxgr wrote:
| 1. is possible without knowing the owner's identity - "public"
| (and maybe whether that means federal or state) and "private"
| seems to be enough.
|
| 2. breaks down when you consider rentals. A tenant might be
| legally allowed to deny access to a landlord in some
| circumstances. Tenants are usually not registered in property
| registers.
|
| For 3., how does the information for taxation have to be
| public? The government also needs to know my pay history to tax
| me, and that's not public either.
|
| 4. if it's the government's information _about me_ , should I
| really get absolutely no say in how it's published?
| pixl97 wrote:
| >4. if it's the government's information about me, should I
| really get absolutely no say in how it's published?
|
| This is not the governments information about you... This is
| the 'publics' information about you and who owns property in
| their communities.
|
| Stop thinking of the government as some kind of corporation,
| and instead the executive will of the populace itself.
| [deleted]
| beardyw wrote:
| Because people have been living in houses for millennia and such
| an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few
| decades.
| 13of40 wrote:
| In fact, only two or three decades ago it was standard for the
| telephone service to print everyone's name, address, and phone
| number in a big book, distribute it to every house and charge
| you $5 a month extra if you wanted to opt out of the list.
| smugma wrote:
| <15 years ago a friend went and got thousands of signatures
| to make phone books opt in vs opt out in SF. He did some sort
| of stunt where he collected over a thousand phone books and
| took a picture of them in front of city hall or other public
| place.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| In the past I've tracked down the names of people in old
| photo's with a viable house number by guessing the city and
| searching newspaper archives. Then confirm with a streetview.
| The archives will have articles mentioning people with their
| street address.
|
| My thought is Americans have become really paranoid compared
| to people 50 years ago. And people are often under the
| illusion that people can find out a lot about you with little
| effort isn't true.
| jfengel wrote:
| Computers have made a lot of information that was
| theoretically accessible into pragmatically accessible.
| There was a kind of semi privacy that is changing. Some
| have adjusted by insisting that it was genuine privacy all
| along. Others don't care that semi private is now public,
| largely because they still feel pragmatically anonymous and
| unthreatened by what isn't.
|
| Neither is entirely wrong, but the ones with the strongest
| feelings either way don't do a great job of taking the
| others into account.
| lxgr wrote:
| The idea of a property register is much younger than a few
| millenia, though, so that's not a good argument for its default
| privacy level.
|
| The United States are also younger than even a single
| millenium.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| I do not have an answer for your specific question and I am not
| an expert on this but for what it's worth one can purchase
| properties in the name of a trust or a business. It will still be
| public but a trust can be anonymously named in some states. This
| can have property tax implications depending on the type of trust
| and the state so review the options in your location with a
| lawyer knowledgeable in trusts and property taxes.
| bozhark wrote:
| Trust, business, LLC, foundation, church.
|
| There's many options
| uberman wrote:
| I think one reason is historically, if you and I own property
| next to each other but you pay twice the property tax that I pay,
| the public might have an interest in knowing who I was and how I
| got a sweetheart assessment.
|
| If you want to obfuscate your ownership i imagine you could
| create a trust or LLC and transfer and sell your direct ownership
| to the new entity. This might have some short and long term tax
| implications and I would consult a tak expert.
|
| Many ranches were i live are now owned by family trusts i assume
| for inheritance reasons.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Why would they publish names? It's really no value to home buyers
| to see the name associated with a listing. In some cases, there
| are antidiscrimination laws that limit what information should be
| disclosed to sellers and buyers. Name might be one of those.
| cpursley wrote:
| All this is available (including names of owners) from your
| typical government assessors web portal. Or via consolidators
| where the ownership, zoning, acreage, tax assessments and other
| data is available via an api call.
| prepend wrote:
| I don't think the name is important for Zillow site visitors so
| they don't publish it. The value and features are important.
|
| I imagine Zillow sells marketing databases with actual names.
|
| And of course you can just go to the county assessor to look up
| the name. But I don't think Zillow even links to their source.
| cpursley wrote:
| They probably just get the info from data wholesalers who get
| it by scrapping government assessor databases (ATTOM, etc).
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| Probably the biggest reason would be so that when you buy a
| property you can independently confirm the vendor actually owns
| it.
| [deleted]
| benlivengood wrote:
| Why wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over
| the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a
| clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers
| need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is
| willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous
| region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full
| transparency of real estate ownership and transactions. My fear
| is that otherwise we'll revert to de facto feudalism where the
| wealthiest entities can acquire and lease out virtually all real
| property.
|
| [0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11957208/near-1-billion-land-
| purch...
| beebmam wrote:
| Why should real estate have MORE stringent requirements on
| ownership disclosure than stock ownership?
| tomtheelder wrote:
| It shouldn't, but real estate disclosure isn't the problem
| there.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is an argument to make stock ownership more public, not
| to make real estate ownership less public.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Why should stock ownership have LESS stringent requirements
| on ownership disclosure than real estate?
| kanbara wrote:
| you want your ownership of multiple properties that you dont
| contribute value to but earn equity in on the backs of renters to
| be private so you don't get spam? or is there another reason?
| rawgabbit wrote:
| _Criminals have for decades anonymously hidden ill-gotten gains
| in real estate, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in March,
| adding that as much as $2.3 billion was laundered through U.S.
| real estate between 2015 and 2020._
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-set-unveil-long-awaited-...
| a_square_peg wrote:
| The United States has a policy about government data - including
| weather (e.g. NOAA) and GPS, to be made freely available to the
| public. Your property data, collected at the county level, falls
| under this category so they are accessible to everyone.
|
| However, I think Zillow would be prevented from publishing the
| owner name, since it would probably be classified as Personal
| Identifiable Information (PII).
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| If you aren't following any regulations, PII can be published.
|
| You only have to worry about PII if you have to be compliant
| with a standard that prevents it.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Well the tax assessment is public probably so that people can see
| that the government is acting honestly.
|
| I don't know if there's a particularly good reason for ownership
| to be public. Some countries only have transaction dates/prices
| but not names published. Some countries make everyone's
| individual tax returns publicly available. I don't know why the
| us found this particular balance.
|
| I assume that Zillow would get a load of angry emails if they
| published ownership information and it isn't worth enough to them
| to publish it.
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(page generated 2023-09-03 23:00 UTC)