Dear SFNative,

Long and short answer...... Go to City Hall and look up names via Assessor's Office. Ask your Realtor to help you (because he/she can get the names from a Title Company, MLS via Tax Data or Realdex/Metroscan to which most of us subscribe.)

Good luck,

Sally

Not so easy. The San Francisco Business Times (published weekly) has pages of all publicly recorded transactions (property transfers, bankruptcies, fictitious names for businesses) organized by county. They include all real estate transactions that closed that week – with the names of the seller and the buyer by property address.

Owner information is made public through the county's Assessor-Recorder office (in San Francisco, our county and city are the same) but it is not easy to find this information online and the records are not always current. The property tax statements can be pulled up by address, but they do not show names online and the deed can be ordered if you know the person’s name, but it does not show the address online so you would really have to go to City Hall and look through the physical records for the current (buyer) and previous (seller) names.

The MLS has a place for the owner (seller’s) name but it is usually left blank.

The best thing is to go through your real estate professional, who will have access to online title company systems showing the chain of title (current and previous owners).

Good luck!
Laura Lambert
The Azari Group

Why do you need to know who bought or sold their home?

Tap

This information is public record and it is online. In SF you can view recorded deeds online, although I think the county charges a fee. Title companies aggregate this type of information, but they tend to charge a fee as well. Most of us subscribe to services offered by title companies and could certainly look up buyer/seller information on an individual basis.

Do you need help with something like this? To locate buyer/seller data for one transaction is fairly simple and straight forward. To do so for a large number of transactions would take time and resources.

I hope this answers your question. The names of parties to a transaction are available online - for a fee. But most Realtors could probably dig this up on a case-by-case basis.

Take care,

Jason Chapin
jchapin(at)mcguire.com

They would have to be subscribing to a service that feeds out the tax records. The tax records are a public document and there are a number of services that offer access for a fee. The data is usually a little old. You can't find out who boight and is moving in any faster than if you walked down the street and intorduced yourself.
The City & County hasn't moved into the 20th century yet and probably won't till we can get enough taxes in the kitty to pay for the access.
There is a "work in progress" at the CCSF Index of Records site but . . .