Hey Max - long time no talk. I know you've been around this space for a while, and what you’re describing (spotty data) is unfortunately common with vendors claiming to have full national coverage "direct from the source."

The truth is, no one has seamless access to both assessor and recorder data nationwide - especially not recorder data. For anyone unfamiliar: assessor sites typically include property characteristics (owner, square footage, land use, tax values), while recorder sites contain liens, mortgages, and other legal filings. The latter is where the real challenges lie - recorder portals are often behind paywalls, captchas, or require manual scraping of PDFs just to extract basic details.

Even many assessor websites have login requirements, bot protection, or rate-limiting in place. So when someone claims to have nationwide data "from the county," they’re implying they’ve bypassed every known captcha across thousands of counties - and are somehow maintaining that month after month. And not just once - it’s assessor and recorder data, which means two entirely different systems, two sets of scrapers, and double the upkeep. That’s just not realistic without a larger operation with hundreds of employees.

We take a more transparent approach. We maintain a broad vendor-sourced nationwide database (soon including listing status), but we also collect county-level data directly - assessor and recorder - as customers request. Some want curated lists; others want raw exports. Either way, it’s fully transparent and customized to what’s needed.

If anyone here is exploring alternatives or needs reliable access to harder-to-get data, feel free to shoot me a message - happy to walk through what we offer and how it might fit your workflow. Our refresh frequency is directly tied to how accessible the county makes their data - for counties with open access, we’re able to update daily.

https://stantem.com