Real estate has more public data than almost any other industry in America.
(And so does every competing vendor in your category.)
Assessor records, deed histories, mortgage amounts, equity positions, foreclosure notices… that stack of data has been packaged and sold for twenty-some years. Pulling property records to find motivated sellers is a starting point, not a strategy.
What those records don’t have: the specific dollar penalty a building owner will owe starting in 2030 if they do not retrofit. Or the maturity date on the CMBS loan at that same address. Or the open code violations accumulating across their portfolio that remain unresolved. Or even the eviction filing patterns, indicating that their multifamily operation has been under strain since the last quarter. None of that is in the property record.
But, every one of those sources is public. Most are free. And almost no one selling into commercial real estate is using them to find the hidden customers.
Get out the KitchenAid. Let’s mix things up.
We have ranked these public data sources by how much of an edge they give you over every other vendor fighting for attention in your prospect’s inbox.
Every county records property transfers, deeds, mortgages, and liens. Every assessor maintains ownership, characteristics, and assessed value. Aggregators like ATTOM, CoreLogic, Regrid, and PropStream cover roughly 155 to 160 million properties at about 99 percent U.S. population coverage, refreshed daily via API or bulk:
Owner name and mailing address
Sale history and price
Mortgage lender, amount, origination, and recording date
Liens and transfers
Property characteristics and assessed value
Persistent property identifier for joining to other sources
Treat this as the spine, not the edge. Every source in this inventory joins to it. The residential motivated-seller motion built on this data is one of the most saturated GTM plays anywhere. Arrive with something attached to the join key that no competitor thought to cross.
ATTOM Property and Mortgage Data · Regrid · CoreLogic · PropStream
A growing set of city and state laws requires large buildings to publicly benchmark energy and water use and, increasingly, to meet hard emissions caps with penalties attached. New York City is the model: Local Law 84 requires annual benchmarking, Local Law 97 sets emissions caps at $268 per ton of CO2 over the limit, and Local Law 33 assigns public energy grades from A to F. Submissions go through the EPA’s Energy Star Portfolio Manager, and the city publishes the results. Roughly 57% of covered buildings are projected to exceed the 2030 to 2034 caps. These data sources include:
Building address and covered-buildings-list status
Benchmarked energy use intensity (EUI)
Water use
Emissions versus the applicable cap
Projected annual penalty in dollars
Public energy grade (A through F)
Energy efficiency, retrofit, decarbonization, HVAC, ESG compliance, and capital planning vendors all sell from this source. The entry point is the projected penalty: a specific dollar figure on a specific building, years before the deadline, pulled from a filing the owner submitted themselves.
NYC Benchmarking and LL97 · EPA Energy Star Portfolio Manager · LL97 Accelerator
Notices of default, lis pendens (pending lawsuits), notices of trustee’s sale, and bank-owned records. Each stage is dated and retrievable. For commercial and operator targets, distress is a specific, timed signal that stacks well with maintenance and violation data from the same property. Fields include:
Notice type: NOD, lis pendens, trustee’s sale, or REO
Filing date and auction date
Opening bid
Foreclosing lender and servicer
Workout and restructuring firms, opportunistic acquirers, property services, and capital advisory all sell from this source. The residential motivated-seller version of this motion is the saturated lane; aim it at commercial properties and operator portfolios.
Most commercial loans are private. Commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) and agency loans (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD) are not. Loan amounts, origination and maturity dates, performance status, and servicer watchlist flags are all trackable for the securitized slice of the market through SEC EDGAR asset-backed securities filings. Deeper performance data runs through Trepp and Moody’s Analytics. Data sets include:
Loan amount, origination date, and maturity date
Property address and type
Performance and delinquency status
Servicer watchlist flags
Securitization deal identifier
CRE debt and lending technology, restructuring and advisory, investment platforms, and brokers with access to capital all sell from this source. The honest limit: bank and life-insurance-company commercial loans are private, so this covers only the CMBS and agency slices.
Renovation and repositioning activity at the asset level. A major permit for a specific building signals an ownership decision about what that asset will become, made before any broker has the listing and before the leasing sign goes up. Covered in depth in the construction guide, accessed at scale via Shovels:
Permit type and scope
Valuation
Contractor
Filing and issue dates
Address and parcel identifier
Construction and project management, FF&E and procurement, property management software, and leasing and marketing platforms all sell from this source. The window is between permit issuance and project completion, when downstream vendor decisions are being made.
Pre-development approvals, rezonings, and planning-commission discussions. The earliest public leading signal of new development is often months before a permit and sometimes years before groundbreaking. Fragmented at the city level, partially aggregated through Shovels Decisions:
Planning application type and status
Rezoning and variance requests
Project description and address
Commission hearing dates
Developers, land brokers, construction-phase vendors, and anyone selling into the pipeline before a permit is filed all benefit from this source. The window here is the widest in the vertical and the most forward-looking.
City building and housing-code violation records: open violations, complaints, and orders to repair. Available through cities with open-data portals, like New York City’s HPD and DOB records, are the most accessible and field-rich examples. Data sets will have:
Property address and violation type
Class and severity
Complaint and issue dates
Status: open or resolved
Issuing agency
Property management software, maintenance and work-order platforms, and compliance tools all sell from this source. A portfolio with a pile of open violations is broadcasting operational pain in a public record. Almost no one selling into property management is reading it.
NYC Open Data · Check Sunlight Foundation’s list of Code Enforcement Violations data sets by city/municipality
Court records of eviction filings and outcomes. Turnover and management strain signal for multifamily operators. The data is public but fragmented, court by court, and the assembly cost is the barrier, not the access.
Filing date and case type
Property address
Outcome and timeline
Multifamily property management platforms, tenant-experience products, and collections tools all sell from this source. Pair it with code violations on the same portfolio, and the picture of operational strain becomes very specific.
Search eviction and housing-court filings + the city.
HUD-insured and assisted property data plus the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit database: LIHTC properties, unit counts, placed-in-service dates, and compliance period expiration dates. Free and public from HUD:
Property and unit count
Placed-in-service date
LIHTC compliance period and expiration
HUD assistance type and contract details
For the affordable-housing segment, the expiration of the compliance period is a precise temporal trigger. A LIHTC property approaching the end of its compliance window faces a defined set of decisions about recapitalization, repositioning, or disposition, and the date of that decision is publicly available in a database.
Public REITs disclose strategy, portfolio composition, and risk on EDGAR. Municipal bond and bond-financed real estate projects file on EMMA. Free and public. Rich for large institutional owners and for securitized project debt. Data points include:
REIT portfolio holdings, strategy, and risk disclosures
Lease expiration schedules and debt maturity profiles
Bond-financed project details and covenant conditions
Institutional sales teams, advisory firms, and capital markets vendors that sell to public owners or to bond-financed projects use this source. Smaller and more specific than the rest of the inventory, but the information is exact.
A surge in property management, leasing, asset management, or compliance hiring is an operational strain in motion. Best used as a confirmation layer on a structured signal. Pair it with a permit, and the repositioning timeline sharpens; pair it with code violations, and the management capacity picture becomes concrete.
Job title and department
Posting date and location
Urgency indicators in the listing text
Recruiting and HR platforms, operational software vendors, and anyone selling into the transition window between operating teams all read this signal. Its value is in the combination, not in isolation.
Check job sites like Indeed and LinkedIn Jobs.
Here are five recipes ranked by the asymmetry they create. Each one combines public sources into a specific dish: a pain-based segment plus a message angle no competitor can match, because none of your competitors has combined the same ingredients.
(Note - the messages are purely samples meant to give you an idea of what’s possible at the most basic level and are not up to PVP/PQS standards.)
The Dish: A commercial building owner facing a dated, dollar-quantified emissions penalty before a fixed compliance deadline.
Ingredients: Building energy benchmarking and LL97-style emissions data (a building projected to breach the 2030 cap, with a calculable annual penalty) + assessor record (owner name and mailing address) + public energy grade (optional garnish).
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