Key takeaways
- Listings are fresh but describe asking prices, not final sales.
- Public records are authoritative but slower and messy to match.
- Licensed feeds are reliable but come with usage rules.
Listing data
Listings tell you what's on the market right now: asking price, photos, descriptions, price changes and days on market. They're the freshest signal, but asking prices are not sale prices.
Public records
Assessor, deed and permit records describe ownership, transfers, tax values and renovations. They're authoritative, but formats differ by county and updates can lag by weeks.
Licensed feeds
MLS feeds and commercial data providers offer cleaner, more complete data under a license. Always check what the license allows: display, modeling, resale or internal use only.
Putting them together
The real work is matching: one property, many sources, many address formats. A stable property ID and good deduplication matter more than any single source.
