How this data is made

Published notices of foreclosure suits: chiefly the notice of action a court’s clerk issues when an owner being sued cannot be served in person, and the other default-stage filings that are published as official records. Each is the court’s own public notice, printed because the law requires it, and read as it was published, not copied from a summary of it.

Every notice is read from an ordinary request, as a member of the public would read it. A notice that sits behind a login, a paywall or a CAPTCHA is not read.

Only pre-foreclosures. A notice that announces a sale — a notice of sale, a list of properties set for sale, a sale result — is a foreclosure, not a pre-foreclosure, and is left out, even though many of them mention the lis pendens. Each notice is checked for what it does: it must serve or announce a suit, not set or report a sale.

From each printing we keep what it prints: the county and the court, the case number, the lender or association suing, the kind of foreclosure, every defendant with the last known address printed and how the suit names them (an owner, an unknown spouse, the unknown heirs of a deceased owner, unknown tenants, or another party), the property address, the legal description and the parcel ID, the mortgage being foreclosed where it is described, the plaintiff’s attorney, the clerk’s date, and the date the owner must answer by.

A value the notice does not print is dropped, never guessed. “Not in the record” means exactly that. In particular, a property address is only ever the one the notice gives for the property; it is never inferred from an owner’s mailing address, which is often somewhere else.

In some counties the record also starts from the clerk’s own list of new court filings, the day a suit is filed and before any notice runs. Those records carry each party’s address as filed, whether the property is the owner’s homestead, and the value band of the claim. The property address there is the one given for the tenants or parties in possession, who are named because they live at the property.

A notice of action runs on consecutive weeks, and a suit against three owners can print three notices, so one case is usually several printings. They are one record when they share a case number within a county. A case number is printed many ways, with or without the county’s code, the court’s letters, division suffixes and leading zeros, so it is compared on its year, its court and its sequence number. A notice that prints no case number cannot be told apart from the next suit by the same lender, so it is not published.

The defendants of every printing are merged, one entry per person, keeping the entry that prints an address. Where printings differ on another field, the newest one that states it wins. The first publication is the earliest date any printing gives, and the response date the latest.

Notices are read the day they are published, folded into their cases, and the county and state counts are recomputed after each day’s notices. Alerts go out after that, so a suit whose notice ran yesterday reaches a daily alert this morning and a weekly one the next Monday.

Every county and state with a case on record has a page, and every page is linked. Only the ones with enough to say are submitted to search engines: a county page is published once eight cases in it have first published a notice in the last 90 days, and withdrawn only below five. The gap is deliberate; on one threshold a small county would enter and leave the sitemap week by week.

The verdict is recomputed after every refresh and stored, so a page, the sitemap and the history of what we asked to be indexed all read the same answer. Case records themselves are never submitted: they name private people, and they are behind sign-in.

• The court file. The complaint, the docket and every later order are kept by the clerk of court. A record carries the case number to look them up.
• Suits served in person. A notice of action is published only when an owner could not be served in person, so a suit where every owner was served directly may never print one. The list is a large share of a county’s new foreclosures, not all of them.
• How much is owed, or the equity. A notice rarely states the balance. Where it describes the mortgage, the record shows the original amount; check the county’s property records for value.
• What happens next. Whether the owner reinstates, sells, settles or loses the suit is not in the notice. Check the docket before you act.
• Counties and states we do not read yet. A county appears here the morning its first case is read; the state pages list every county we hold.

We are not a court, a clerk or a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. The court file governs every case. Questions about the data go to support; questions about a case go to the clerk of court.