Why Are Sold Prices and Property Data Suddenly Behind a Paywall?

The complaint arrives in several wordings and one mood. The site that showed what the house down the street sold for now wants an account, then a credit card. The owner's name that used to sit under the address is "premium". A "basic" property record costs a monthly fee that is easy to start and hard to find again. This article explains what changed, who holds the data, how to read it at the source, where a fee is the government's own, and what you buy when you pay for a report instead.

"It used to be free, now you have to pay": what actually changed

The records did not change. A recorded deed is a public document the day it is filed, the assessor's roll is a public document because taxes are levied on it, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency publishes its house price indexes as public datasets⁴. What changed is the layer between you and those records. Portal estimators and lead-generation calculators showed sold prices for years because the number drew visitors whose contact details could be handed to agents; the price was a lead magnet, and when the leads thin out the magnet moves behind a login. Data vendors license county files in bulk, add a search box and resell the result as a subscription, which is the "membership required to see prices" you met. Neither company owns the underlying data, and neither can stop you from reading it where it was filed.

The guide to official home value data sources lists every public dataset a US valuation rests on; this article is the practical companion for the day a site that used to show them for free asks for money.

"Membership required to see prices": who holds a sold price and what it costs

Three public institutions hold the pieces of a US sold price, and all three are open.

The county clerk or recorder holds the deed. In Florida the statute is explicit: it is state policy that all state, county and municipal records are open for personal inspection and copying by any person, and agencies are expected to provide remote electronic access where feasible¹. The same statute lets an office charge for copies and for requests that take extensive clerical work¹, which is why a certified copy costs money while looking at the record does not.

The property appraiser or assessor holds the roll: owner of record, living area, year built, land, and the sales history the office uses to set assessments. Miami-Dade's office, to take one large county, lets anyone search by address, owner name or folio number and offers a Comparable Sales tool with sale information across the county². Most counties run something similar.

The FHFA holds the trend: house price indexes for states, the 100 largest metros, counties, ZIP codes and census tracts, free to download, plus a calculator that FHFA notes does not project the value of any particular house⁴.

"Pay to see what my neighbor sold for": the lookup you can do yourself

Here is the route for any Florida address; other states differ in names and tax rates but rarely in structure.

1. Open the county property appraiser's search and type the address. The record shows the owner, the characteristics and, in most Florida counties, a sales history with dates and prices².
2. If the price is missing or looks like a nominal figure, note the deed's book and page or instrument number from the same record.
3. Open the clerk's official records search and pull the deed. Deeds are recorded documents and therefore public¹.
4. Find the documentary stamp line. Florida taxes deeds at 70 cents for each $100 of consideration in every county except Miami-Dade, where the rate is 60 cents plus a 45-cent surtax that does not apply to a single-family dwelling; the tax is paid to the clerk when the deed is recorded³.
5. Divide the stamps by the rate: by 0.007 outside Miami-Dade, by 0.006 for a Miami-Dade house. The result is the consideration the parties declared.

Ten minutes, no account, no card. How to turn three such sales into a defensible figure for your own house is the subject of the guide to finding comparable sales.

Worked example: a Miami-Dade neighbor's sale, read from the deed

This is an example with invented parties; the tax rate and the index values are real³⁴.

Your neighbor's single-family house in Miami-Dade County sold in the second quarter of 2026. The portal that used to display the price now asks for a membership. You open the deed instead: the documentary stamp tax reads $3,900. At 60 cents per $100 for a single-family dwelling in Miami-Dade³, the consideration is $3,900 ÷ 0.006 = $650,000.

The same record shows the neighbor's own purchase in the second quarter of 2019, with stamps of $2,100, so they paid $350,000. The FHFA all-transactions index for the Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall metropolitan division stood at 335.15 in 2019Q2 and 666.21 in 2026Q2⁴.

The sale landed below the metro path. That is information: the street lagged the division, the house carried deferred maintenance, or the sale was not at arm's length. A paid portal screen would have shown $650,000 and nothing else; the deed and the index give you the figure and a question.

"Can't see owner info without a subscription": the name is on the roll

The owner of record in the United States is on the assessor's or property appraiser's roll, and the roll is searchable by owner name as well as by address in offices such as Miami-Dade's². What people-search and data-broker sites sell for a monthly fee is the bundle around the name: phone numbers, relatives, previous addresses and a "report" cover. The name itself was never theirs to gate.

One legal line matters whoever supplies the name. The Fair Credit Reporting Act lists the permissible purposes for which a consumer report may be furnished, among them credit transactions, employment, insurance underwriting and eligibility for a government license or benefit⁸. Ownership data used for any of those decisions brings the site, and you, inside that regime. For US addresses only, a CheckValue report also shows the owner of record, drawn from the county's public files: the owner type, the last sale and the mailing city, with the notice that the data may not be used for credit, employment, insurance or tenant-screening decisions. How to read a deed, a parcel number and an LLC-held title is covered in the guide to finding out who owns a property and in property records explained.

"Subscription trap for property records": how it is built and how to spot it

The trap is a negative option: you sign up for something small and your silence is treated as consent to keep charging. Federal law already covers it. Under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act an online seller using a negative option feature must clearly and conspicuously disclose all material terms before it collects your billing information, must obtain your express informed consent before charging your card or account, and must provide simple mechanisms to stop the recurring charges⁶.

What to check before you type a card number into a property records site:

• The trial. A "$1 for 7 days" offer followed by a monthly price in smaller type is the classic form. Read the renewal price and date before the trial, not after.
• The cancel route. If cancellation exists only by phone, chat or mail, assume it is designed to be missed. The law asks for a simple mechanism⁶.
• The order button. It should restate the recurring charge next to the click; recurring terms buried in a linked policy fail the "clear and conspicuous" test⁶.
• Your statement. Set a reminder for the day before the first renewal.

What to do instead: pay the county per document when you need a certified copy, read everything else at the source for nothing, and buy an assembled report once rather than renting one monthly.

When the paywall is the government's own: non-disclosure states and copy fees

Two situations look like a paywall and are not a reseller's doing.

The first is a non-disclosure state. Texas, the largest, keeps sale prices out of the public record; the Harris Central Appraisal District writes in its 2025 market trends report that some prices are confidential or not shared with the district because of non-disclosure laws⁵. The district still tracks the market through the Houston Association of Realtors: for 2024 it reports 85,163 single-family sales, a median of $335,000 and an average of $422,590⁵. Those are aggregates. The price of the house next door reaches agents and appraisers through the multiple listing service, so a Texas comparable comes from a licensed professional's sold report; no portal, free or paid, can show what the public record does not contain.

The second is a copy fee charged by the office itself. Florida's public records statute allows fees for copies and for requests requiring extensive use of resources¹; inspection remains free. That fee buys a certified document you can use in a transaction, a service charge rather than a toll on the information.

What you pay for when you buy a report

If the records are free, why pay anyone? You pay for assembly and judgment, not for the data. Pulling a deed, decoding stamps, checking the index and adjusting three closed sales for size, condition and year built takes an afternoon the first time. A report does it in one pass and shows its work.

Here is how CheckValue sits in that market. The preview on screen is free: you type the address, confirm a few facts about the house and see the report's layout with its values blurred before you decide. A calculated report costs $3.99 in the United States (€4.99 in Europe) as a one-time purchase; three cost $8.99 and ten $22.99, and none of them expires. There is no account tier for sold prices, no phone number to enter, and nothing is passed to agents. The only recurring plan is Pro for professionals, 30 reports a month with letterhead on the PDF, cancel monthly, no free trial. Every figure, including the official price index⁴ and the comparable sales, points to a numbered reference at the end, so you can walk any number back to its public source.

What the report is not: an appraisal. It does not replace one where a lender, a court or the IRS requires a licensed appraiser, and the value is a model's point estimate with a range, without an accuracy percentage. How the model builds that estimate from the public datasets is set out separately. To see the structure before spending anything, start the free preview of your report; the pricing page carries the full list in dollars and euros.

Is it the same in Europe?

Mostly yes. France publishes Demandes de valeurs foncières, every real estate sale of the past five years drawn from notarial deeds and the cadastre, under an open license at no charge, updated each April and October, with Alsace, Moselle and Mayotte excluded⁹. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain and Italy each have a price index, a register or cadastre and their own fee rules; the country table in the data sources guide names them. The pattern matches the United States: an official source for the level, an official index for the trend, and a commercial layer between that sometimes charges for what the state gives away.

The figures above carry their year and their source. This is general information, not legal or tax advice.

This article is general information, not legal, tax or investment advice. Figures and rules carry the year they were published; check the cited source for the current version.

Christian Eckmair

Co-founder, CheckValue · Managing director, CBDNOL GmbH · More than 20 years in real estate in Tenerife and Austria · Reviewed by Josef Eckmair MBA

Christian Eckmair is co-founder of CheckValue and managing director of CBDNOL GmbH (Ansfelden, Austria). He has worked in real estate for more than 20 years in Tenerife and Austria – buying, renovating, letting and selling residential property – and writes about home values, buying checks and ownership records.

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