Title plant data without building the plant yourself
A title plant is an indexed, queryable copy of a county's recorded documents — and building one is a grind that has little to do with the product on top of it. The records exist; the work is collecting them completely, extracting structured fields from formats designed for filing cabinets, and keeping the index current as new instruments record every day.
Recordpipe supplies that layer as a service. We deliver the structured raw material a title plant is built from: recorded instruments with parties, dates, types, and references extracted into one schema; the backfile loaded as bulk data; the forward feed keeping it current. Your team owns the plant logic, the examination workflows, and the product — the parts that differentiate a title company or a proptech tool. What you stop owning is the county-by-county collection grind that consumes engineering time without ever becoming a moat.
Deed and lien datasets structured for chain of title
Chain-of-title work has a specific data shape: it needs instruments connected to each other, not rows in isolation. A deed matters in relation to the deed before it; a release matters in relation to the mortgage it releases; a lien matters against the ownership interest it encumbers. County recorder data, as published, rarely makes those relationships explicit.
The pipeline builds them in. Grantor and grantee names are delivered as filed and in normalized form, so the same party links across instruments despite spelling drift. Cross-references between related documents are extracted where the record publishes them and inferred by the analysis layer where it does not — always flagged as which, because chain work needs to know the difference between a recorded reference and a computed one. Legal descriptions and parcel identifiers ride along on every row, giving your engine both the party-based and parcel-based paths through the chain.
Backfile plus forward feed: how a title data program runs
Every serious title data program splits into a backfile phase and a forward-feed phase, and pricing both up front is what makes the project plannable. The backfile is the one-time load: the county's recorded history, as deep as the jurisdiction publishes, delivered as analysis-ready bulk files your team imports once. The forward feed is the ongoing contract: newly recorded instruments delivered on cadence — daily where the county publishes daily — as clean deltas that keep the plant converged with the courthouse.
Recordpipe quotes both as fixed prices after scoping, so a single-county pilot and a multi-state program are the same motion at different scale. The pilot pattern works: scope one county for $500, receive a sample and feasibility read within 5 business days, load the backfile, verify against orders you have already examined, then extend. Contracts run from $5,000 for a focused single-county build to $3 million for multi-state programs with hosted APIs in front of them.
County recorder data, shaped for product teams
Investor tools, valuation products, and proptech platforms need the same recorder and assessor raw material as title companies, but shaped differently: ownership history as a timeline, encumbrances as a current-state view, transactions as events a model can consume. Because Recordpipe builds to your schema rather than reselling a fixed catalog, the same collection produces whichever shape your product ingests.
Delivery formats follow the product too. Bulk CSV or Parquet suits data science teams and initial loads; a hosted REST API with keys and documentation suits application backends; webhook pushes suit products that react to newly recorded documents — a transfer on a watched parcel, a lien landing against a tracked owner. Where counties publish documents as images, the pipeline extracts structured fields from them, and scoping confirms per county what extraction quality looks like on your actual target jurisdictions before any contract is signed.
What a delivery looks like
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| instrument_reference | The recording reference as assigned by the county recorder. |
| instrument_type | Deed, mortgage, release, lien, assignment — mapped to one controlled vocabulary across counties. |
| recording_date | Date the instrument was recorded, as published. |
| grantor | Granting party as filed, with a normalized variant for cross-instrument linking. |
| grantee | Receiving party as filed, with a normalized variant for cross-instrument linking. |
| legal_description | Property description as it appears on the instrument. |
| parcel_id | Assessor parcel identifier where the record supports the join. |
| related_instruments | Cross-references to connected documents — flagged as recorded or inferred by the analysis layer. |
| consideration_class | Transaction value band as derivable from the published record, never a guessed amount. |
| source_citation | Reference to the public record this row was extracted from. |