What ACRIS is, and what it is not

What it is

ACRIS is the City Register's document system. Deeds, mortgages, satisfactions, assignments, agreements, transfer tax returns and a long tail of other instruments are recorded in it, indexed against the tax lots they concern. It covers the four boroughs outside Staten Island directly; Staten Island records are maintained by the Richmond County Clerk and reach ACRIS as well.

The three files this site uses

Real Property Master

One row per document: its identifier, what type of document it is, the consideration, the date on the document and the date it was recorded.

Real Property Legals

One row per lot named on a document: borough, block, lot, unit designation and the property type. This is the file that connects a transaction to a building.

Digital Tax Map

Not part of ACRIS, but necessary alongside it: it publishes which condominium unit lots belong to which billing lot, which is what allows an apartment sale to be attached to the building it is in.

Document types

ACRIS uses more than a hundred document type codes. This site keeps four, the ones that record a transfer of a home for a stated consideration.

Property types

Each lot on a document carries a property type. This site keeps the residential ones and drops accessory sales such as parking spaces, storage rooms and maid's rooms, because their prices would distort every median on the site.

What it is not

ACRIS is authoritative about what was filed and about nothing else. It is not a listing service and holds no asking prices. It carries no square footage, no floor plan, no condition report, no arrears. It does not know whether a sale was arm's length. Its figures are typed by the filer, so a misplaced digit stays in the record until somebody files a correction. Every one of those limits is why this site prints the instrument alongside the number rather than presenting a bare price.