I'm in the middle of buying a place and I'm just floored by how archaic this all is.
I feel like I'm playing private detective. I'm digging through the county assessor's website (which looks like it was built in 1999), trying to find old building permits from the city, and attempting to verify the title history. It's a huge, stressful scavenger hunt.
My biggest issue is the lack of a simple "CarFax for houses." The fact that there isn't one place to see the full, verified history for the biggest purchase of my life is insane. This whole mess got me thinking—what's everyone else's version of this?
What's the one complex process in real estate that makes you scream, "Why hasn't tech fixed this yet?"
Seriously, it can't just be me who finds this whole industry ridiculously behind the times.
Why can I get a full history report on a used car in 30 seconds, but not on a house?
byu/Odd-Chipmunk-6460 inRealEstate
Posted by Odd-Chipmunk-6460
27 Comments
Because it’s my house, not a government records project.
Imagine if I had to report every minor outlet repair, switch swap, or drywall patch.
No thanks, bubba.
because your house doesn’t have a VIN number that was tracked from manufacture date thru registration and at dealerships and other places for service.
Aside from the fact that even IF there were something, the amount of folks who have handymen, unlicensed contractors, and DIYers doing stuff on their homes would make the usefulness of such a platform….very low.
Think about the logistics of all this.
Unless it requires a permit (ie. major renovation/rebuild) or an insurance claim, there really are no records to pull.
Even carfax is full of holes, because it can only track things that are reported. So anything fixed in a driveway or by an independent garage won’t be on it.
Have you volunteered with your local city/town to go through the warehouses full of boxes of old permits and enter all that data into an automated system for them so that they can put it all online? No? Yeah, neither has anyone else….
Title insurance is for the title. A house is just a bunch of wood nails, concrete, drywall, pipes and wiring. If the fundamentals are good the rest are an easy fix. The only time you really need to worry about permits is for major additions and frankly most homes do not have that and it’s easy enough to just avoid the ones that have weird additions. A lot of the more typical permits a house might have are somewhat inconsequential. Most people are going to be concerned with the current condition of the property which is why you get inspections.
But there is this? Zillow and mls show how often it bought sold or rented. The square footage . If the home was recently renovated. Then you have a seller property disclosure exhibit where the owner discloses renovations, defects, flooding, lead paint, insurance claims, age of systems etc. Most cities have online websites where you can verify the SPD statement to see what permits or violations a house has. Your insurance agent can verify insurance claims for you. If you have an agent they will pull all this info for you.
Laughs in Iowan, the last abstract of title state. Yes, every property has a giant book of ownership records all the way back to statehood.
My brother’s house, built in 1925, has no record of the ducts being wrapped in asbestos. What’s up with that?
yeah so car gets repaired it get’s put in the computer system. Also, accidents etc. have insurance and police reports even so that’s public record.
Yes you can search permits for big repairs, but you’re not going to make me or any home owner list every repair ever done.
2025: fixed jiggly toilet handle, and more landscaping rocks, put new lock on fence…etc.
CarFax isn’t even accurate. There’s lots of poor data and broken data feeds.
I’ve been shopping for a Lexus and Lexus itself has its own proprietary VIN lookup. I have yet to find a CarFax that matches 1:1 with the Lexus database because not all dealerships report the same quality of data.
For example, CarFax will say “service recorded” but matching the dates to the Lexus records will show “oil changed; customer declined CV boot and recommended transmission service.” So someone looking at the CarFax report would think it had a good service recorded when in reality the previous owner kicked the can down the road for you to pick up.
For real estate, we have the deed records. But this only contains things filed with the city or county which includes permits. Someone changing a light bulb or air filter doesn’t need to record it with the local government.
If only you had some crappy technology to sell to solve this “problem” that doesn’t exist…
Most counties have an online records search you can pay to access or print for title chain and liens. There’s no way to access “homeowner changed the kitchen faucet and planted a shrub on xx/xx/xxxx” Its just not realistic info. Almost nobody pulls permits for minor repairs/fixes/updates. You would likely not learn anything of true substance with a “carfax for houses”. Get an inspection or 3 if you want as much current info as you can find out and read the sellers disclosures.
I’ve owned 30 cars over the past 40 years and not one of them has had a single Carfax input during my ownership.
My county has digitized records. It’s very locality dependent.
Those vehicle reports are pretty good at finding obvious things, they’re also pretty good at causing you to overlook major things. I wouldn’t put much faith in them.
There are 130 million residential properties in the US. There are millions of sources with data about these properties. Simply collecting the data is a mind-numbing task, and verifying it would be virtually impossible.
A couple of years back, I was brought in as an industry advisor to a tech team that was working on a project concept to tackle this. It sounded great at the beginning. A couple of national brokerages offered to buy “it” (the framework) if we could solve the data collection and verification problem. We couldn’t. I wish I had those three months back.
What’s the VIN of your house?
Oh yea, nvm
CarFax isn’t always accurate. It’s cheap, but the information is not always high quality.
Real estate title history is complicated, and inaccuracies could have huge consequences.
Building an online system that is comprehensive and convenient to use would be very expensive. Governments don’t want to pay to build and maintain these, since the law does not require that they do. Title companies have built such systems. They are available as an expensive service. And they are not perfect, which is why there is title insurance.
Carfax doesn’t have ALL the info about a car, it only tracks insurance claims. And the insurance industry has had a way to do this, CLUE reports, for decades now.
There are a lot of third party sites the purport to share real estate info. But they don’t independently fact check things, they just scrape and go. So even if you want to put the time into it, it won’t be accurate enough that anyone should rely on it.
1. Any history on a used car only goes back a century or so at most.
2. Very few of the 10s of millions of vehicles that are still roadworthy are even more than 20 years old. The average age of a vehicle on the road in the US is ~12 years. The vast majority of vehicles outside of a junk yard were built during the electronic records age.
3. Real Estate ownership goes back centuries. In some countries many centuries to over a millenia. William the Conqueror commissioned a countrywide land owners records survey in England in 1086 because records before that were inconsistent.
4. Vehicles are chattel, not real estate, and fall under completely different areas of the law.
5. There are 100s of millions of real estate ownership records in the US alone. It is inefficient to conduct a title search through all of them in anticipation of possibly needing it, so it is done on an as-need basis.
people have to register their cars every year or two, and the mileage is reported.
if you’re in an accident, there’s going to be a report based on the VIN (if insurance is involved).
if there’s a recall, you’d see if the issue had been resolved.
If you go to JiffyLube or DIY, nothing is reported. New tires, brakes, etc generally not reported.
As for houses, it’s up to the county to go digital with permits and other records. You still wouldn’t know any improvements done without a permit being necessary or filed.
because there is no centrized company that tracks everything on all the houses like you have with carfax. CarFax just happens to be the biggest player in the data reporting and things not going to them hurts the cars value.
when car fax first started they did not have all those records and had to really fight to collect them. Now they are so big everyone reports directly to them.
If you want to start a history record of it maybe you could start your own company and make some good money in 30-40 years. You just need to get all the insurance companies on board with reporting to you and all the other players in home repares reporting to you for the centeralized warehouse.
finding title transfers and selling history is easy. Finding the records of major damage and things like roof repairs or major maintainace items is a lot tricker.
This is a billion dollar idea.
>full history report on a used car
That is actually not the case. You get most insurance claims and dealer maintenance. That’s it.
Car gets into an accident and insurance is not involved – not on the report. Regular mechanic or diy person does the maintenance – not reported.
Cars have to be registered. Houses do not. Many of them are so old that they could not be tracked anyway. There is no comparison here.
Reading through the comments I see a point here.
Every single thing does not need to be reported. And there are certain things that should be reported. I think this list would work for a car or a property.
Things to report: Insurance claims. Fire, flood, crime, murder, taxes paid, loans, liens, age. The mileage on a car should be reported. Every surveyor who checks the boundaries should supply a report. Check and double check.
*My home gained land on 3 sides. The owner in the 50s was shrewd and extended the fence line and then poured cement walls to mark the boundaries. The owners of the other homes did not fight it. And when they sold they had a survey and filed it. When the other properties sold no one argued either.
*A friend barrows my car to drive into Canada. She purchased an SUV. It appears the car was involved in a crime, or was owned by a criminal. When she takes that car across the border it gets flagged and searched. It is the car, and has nothing to do with how is driving. That should have been flagged.
There are in developed countries.
Land Registry in the UK or Zoopla website for the basic sale history.