— Get Proactive
Everything in this archive was built from documents anyone can pull: deeds, mortgages, assignments, and satisfactions sitting in a county recording office. Nothing here required a subpoena or a source inside the building. It required showing up — or, now, a browser — and knowing what to look for.
Scope
Delaware is where this archive happened to start, because that's where one eviction case led. But county land records work the same way in every state: a deed, a mortgage, an assignment, a satisfaction, all recorded in the same public office, all searchable by anyone. This archive's own From Eviction to Enlightenment collection began as a single case and grew from there — proof, in our own record, that the pattern isn't confined to one transaction, one county, or one lender.
If you own a home, or your family does, or you're just curious what's recorded against a property — this guide is how you check it yourself.
Why we're saying this
This section is us talking, not a sourced finding — we're labeling it that way on purpose, because the standard on the rest of this site is that a claim gets a document behind it before it gets published. This one is a conviction, not yet a documented statistic, and we're not going to blur that line.
Here's what actually is documented, from the public record, nationwide: after the 2008 financial crisis, the largest mortgage servicers were bailed out with public money. Between 2010 and 2012, state attorneys general and federal regulators investigated widespread "robo-signing" — bank and servicer employees signing thousands of foreclosure documents and sworn affidavits without verifying the facts they were attesting to. That investigation produced the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement: roughly $25 billion, five of the country's largest servicers (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Ally/GMAC), and a court-appointed monitor whose subsequent reports documented continued servicing violations for years afterward.
We believe the pattern documented in this archive — irregular assignments, inconsistent notarization, satisfactions that don't line up with the paper trail — is far more widespread than five servicers and one settlement. We haven't proven that at national scale yet. We're telling you plainly that we believe it, and telling you just as plainly that belief is exactly what it is, until someone — maybe you, checking your own county — turns it into documentation.
Step one
Property law is set state by state, not federally, and every state organizes its statutes differently. You don't have to track down fifty separate government websites to find yours — these three free, independently run legal reference services already index every state's real property law in one place:
None of these three are part of this archive — they're independent, long-established legal publishers. We're pointing you to them because they already do the work of keeping fifty states' worth of links current, which is a job we'd rather not guess our way through on your behalf.
Step two
Every U.S. county (Louisiana calls them parishes; a few states use independent cities) has an office that records real estate documents — usually called the Recorder of Deeds, Register of Deeds, or County Clerk. Most now post a free land-records search on the county or state judiciary website. Search "[your county] recorder of deeds search" or "[your county] register of deeds" and you'll almost always find it in the first few results.
You can search most of these systems by owner name, property address, or parcel/tax ID number. If the online system only goes back a limited number of years, the office itself keeps the full history and will look up older instruments on request, often for a small fee.
Step three
The deed only tells you who owns it. The rest of the file tells you the actual story:
Pull all of them, in order, for the property you're checking. Note the book/page or instrument number on each — that's your citation if you ever need to reference or re-pull the document.
The easiest place to look
Almost every residential mortgage in the U.S. — whether your state calls it a Mortgage or a Deed of Trust — is built on close to the same standardized form, adapted state by state. That's useful for you: once you've read your own numbered covenants, you can recognize the same ones anywhere. In the common multistate version, in order, they cover roughly:
Of everything on that list, Occupancy is the one we've personally seen broken most often. A mortgage taken on owner-occupant terms — which usually gets a better rate than an investment-property loan — requires the borrower to actually live there as a primary residence, typically for at least a year, unless the lender put a written exception on file. Renting a property out from day one, on a loan underwritten as owner-occupied, with no written lender exception in the record, is a real and recognized category of mortgage misrepresentation — the industry and federal regulators call it occupancy fraud, and it's documented in FBI and HUD Office of Inspector General mortgage-fraud reporting going back well over a decade.
To check it yourself: pull the recorded mortgage, find the occupancy covenant — almost always numbered 6 in the standard form — and line up its terms (move-in deadline, minimum occupancy period) against how the property has actually been used. A rental listing, a landlord's own public statements about the property, or the complete absence of any recorded lender exception are all worth comparing against that date.
Beyond the covenants
Once you've read the covenants, check whether the assignments recorded afterward actually make sense against them. Specific things worth checking, in roughly the order they're easiest to catch:
Any one of these, by itself, might have an innocent explanation. What you're looking for is a pattern across the file — and once you know to look, it tends to jump out.
If you rent
A rented property still has a mortgage behind it, bound by the same covenants and the same chain-of-title requirements as any owner-occupied home. If your landlord — a person or an LLC — has been raising rent aggressively or moving to evict without much hesitation, the county record on that property is exactly as public, and exactly as easy to pull in an afternoon, as it is for an owner checking their own home. Read it the same way this guide walks through: covenants first, then the assignment chain.
We're not going to tell you what you'll find — we don't know that, and neither do you until you check. What we will tell you is that whoever is currently collecting your rent or filing to evict you is bound by a document that's sitting in a public office right now, and it's worth knowing what it actually says.
Step four
Our own methodology is the same method we're recommending to you: full-page, unaltered screenshots of what the government system actually shows, with the capture date preserved; certified copies from the recording office where it matters; the book/page or instrument number noted every time. Don't crop, don't annotate the original, don't rely on memory of what a document said.
Once you have more than a few documents
Once you're past a handful of files, keeping track of every deed, assignment, and screenshot by hand gets unmanageable fast. Datashare — a free, open-source tool built by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (search "ICIJ Datashare" to find it) — is what this archive uses internally. It runs entirely on your own computer: nothing you feed into it is uploaded anywhere.
The workflow is simple: drop your scans and screenshots into a folder, add them through Datashare's document-addition task, and it makes every one of them full-text searchable. It can also run automatic name recognition across everything you've collected — useful once you're tracking the same LLC or the same notary showing up across a dozen unrelated files.
If you find something
Assemble the paper trail before you draw a conclusion from it. If what you find looks like it might affect your own title or your ability to sell or refinance, that's a conversation for a real estate attorney or a title professional — this page is a research method, not legal advice. If what you find is a documented pattern you think belongs in the public record, we'd like to see it: reach out with the documents themselves, not just a description of them. That's the same standard we hold every finding in this archive to.