How to Find Your Deed and Property Records on ACRIS

To find your deed in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens, search your address or borough-block-lot (BBL) on ACRIS, the city's free online land records system, then open the document marked DEED. Staten Island records are kept by the Richmond County Clerk instead.

ACRIS shows document images from 1966 to today. You can view and print them free on your own computer. A certified copy, the kind a court or bank may ask for, costs $4 a page from the City Register.

Before you start: get your BBL

Every NYC tax lot has a borough-block-lot number, or BBL. Searching by BBL is the most reliable way to pull every document for a property, because addresses can be written many ways. Your BBL is printed on your property tax bill. You can also look up an address on Roofy's NYC building lookup: the property page's web address ends in the 10-digit BBL. Read BBL and BIN explained for how the number is built.

Condo apartments have their own BBL (a unit lot), so you can search one unit. Co-op apartments don't, because the co-op corporation owns the whole building. More on that below.

Step by step: search ACRIS

1. 1

   Open ACRIS from the Department of Finance site

   Start from the ACRIS page on the Department of Finance website and choose to search property records. If you only have an address, use “Find Addresses and Parcels” first to get the BBL.
2. 2

   Pick a search type

   The main options are party name, parcel identifier (BBL), document type, document ID, and UCC or federal lien file number. For your own home, BBL is best.
3. 3

   Enter the borough, block and lot

   If the form offers a date range, choose the widest one so you see the full history, not just recent filings.
4. 4

   Scan the results list

   Each row shows the document type, the recorded date, the parties and a document ID. Your purchase deed lists you as the grantee/buyer.
5. 5

   Click IMG to see the actual document

   The image opens in a viewer. Use the print icon to print or save it. This is free when you do it yourself.
6. 6

   Order a certified copy if you need one

   Tick the box under the ending page, add it to the cart, enter your name and address, and submit. Certified copies are mailed to you or can be picked up at any City Register office.

Searching by name

A party name search finds every document where a person or company appears as a buyer, seller, borrower or lender. It is useful when you don't know the BBL or want to see all properties tied to one owner. Names must match how they were typed at recording, so try variations (with and without a middle initial, LLC vs L.L.C.). To trace who is behind an LLC, see how to find who owns an LLC building.

What the document codes mean

ACRIS uses short codes. These are the ones a homeowner sees most. Codes and party roles come from the city's ACRIS Document Control Codes table.

Read the history as a chain. A clean chain for a house or condo looks like: DEED to you, MTGE from you to your lender, and later a SAT when that loan is paid off (often alongside a new MTGE if you refinanced). An open mortgage with no matching satisfaction years after a refinance is worth asking your old lender about. See ACRIS mortgages, assignments and satisfactions and finding sale prices in ACRIS deeds.

Co-ops: what you will and won't find

A co-op owner holds shares in a corporation plus a proprietary lease, not a deed. The building's deed is in the co-op corporation's name, under the building's BBL. Your stock certificate and proprietary lease are private documents and are not recorded.

What does appear is your lender's lien. The Department of Finance says UCC financing statements for co-ops are filed through ACRIS, with the building's block and lot. So a co-op search usually shows a UCC1 when a buyer financed and a UCC3 when that loan was paid off or released. Because every apartment shares one BBL, expect a long list. Searching by your own name is often faster. Certified UCC copies cost $10 per document and uncertified copies $5.

Limits to know

• Before 1966. Older documents aren't online. They can be researched in person at the Land Records Research Library at the Queens City Register office. Certified copies of pre-1966 Bronx, Queens or Manhattan documents come from the borough where they were recorded.
• Staten Island. Documents are recorded with the Richmond County Clerk, which has its own block-and-lot search.
• Recorded is not the same as valid. The City Register records documents that meet filing rules. A forged deed can still be recorded. See deed theft protection.
• Indexing errors happen. If a document appears under the wrong BBL or is missing, contact the ACRIS help desk at (212) 487-6300 or [email protected].

Get alerts instead of checking by hand

The Department of Finance's free Notice of Recorded Document Program emails you the day after a deed, mortgage or other covered document is recorded against your property. It doesn't stop a recording, but it tells you fast. Details are in our deed theft guide.

Use the data in bulk

The city also publishes ACRIS as open data, including the Real Property Master (document details) and the Document Control Codes table used above. Roofy uses city open data on its building pages and in recent NYC sales, so you can see a building's owner of record and sale history before you go to ACRIS for the documents themselves.

This guide is general information. For a title question that affects a sale or refinance, ask a real estate attorney or title company.