Reference
ACRIS is run by the NYC Department of Finance and provides public access to every real-property document recorded against an NYC tax lot since 1966. That includes deeds, mortgages, mortgage assignments and satisfactions, mechanic's liens, federal and city tax liens, UCC filings on real property, and easements. Pre-1966 records exist on paper at the borough Block & Lot offices and are out of scope for ACRIS.
Coverage is citywide across all five boroughs. The ACRIS web interface lets the public search by BBL, by party name, by document type, or by recording date range — all free, with full document images downloadable as PDFs. Certified copies cost a fee, but image downloads do not.
Two date fields appear on every ACRIS record and they are not the same: the document date is the date the underlying instrument was signed (a deed dated March 12 was signed on March 12), and the recorded date is the date the document was filed with NYC Finance. The gap between these dates can run from days to several months, especially when a closing settles in escrow before the new owner records. Most professional workflows that flag "recent activity" anchor on the recorded date because it controls when the public-record clock starts.
Data lag from real-world activity to ACRIS visibility is typically 30–60 days. NYC Open Data publishes a monthly bulk export of the Real Property Master and Real Property Parties tables (datasets bnx9-e6tj and 636b-3b5g) — useful for batch analysis but not the daily feed working titled-search vendors rely on. The official ACRIS web search is closer to real-time but is rate-limited and not designed for programmatic use.
Common gotchas. Party names in ACRIS are free-text and contain typos, abbreviations, and inconsistent ordering — "Smith, John" and "JOHN A SMITH" can refer to the same person, and naive joins on party name produce false negatives. Condo unit deeds carry their own BBLs (typically lot 1000+) distinct from the parent lot, so a portfolio query keyed only on parent BBLs will miss condo transfers. And document amount is not the same as sale price: stated consideration on a deed is sometimes nominal ($10) when the transaction is intra-family or LLC-internal, and the real value lives on a paired RP-5217 form rather than the deed itself.
What ACRIS does not contain. Lease agreements are not recorded against real property in NYC and do not appear in ACRIS. Foreclosure case filings live in the New York State court system, not ACRIS, though the lis pendens that initiates a foreclosure does appear as an ACRIS document. Building permits and certificates of occupancy live with NYC Department of Buildings (DOB), not DOF. Tenant-side records — registrations, harassment cases, eviction filings — live with NYC HPD or the NYC Office of Court Administration. Reading ACRIS in isolation produces a partial picture; serious due-diligence workflows always cross-reference at least DOB and HPD.
What MetroDeeds does with this
ACRIS by itself is a transaction log. It tells you that on a given date, party_1 transferred a property at a given BBL to party_2 for a given consideration. What ACRIS deliberately does not do is connect those individual transactions into the broader story of an operator's portfolio.
ACRIS shows you that 80 Woodruff Avenue was sold to "80 WOODRUFF LLC" for $4.2M last spring. ACRIS does not show you that 80 Woodruff LLC is one of seventeen LLCs registered to the same agent address, all controlled by the same operator, who also has 47 open HPD violations across an HPD-registered portfolio of fourteen buildings. MetroDeeds' shell-cluster detection links those LLCs through the NYS DOS agent-address graph; the operator-rollup pipeline joins ACRIS deeds to HPD registration contacts to attribute the buildings; and the Landlord Ripoff Watch surfaces the result as a single operator profile with the full portfolio, the violation density, the eviction execution rate, and the recent ACRIS deed history all on one page.
ACRIS also won't tell you whether a sale was cash or financed — the deed and mortgage are recorded as separate documents. MetroDeeds matches them by buyer-name tokens within a ±14-day window of recorded dates, so the deed feed labels each transfer Cash or Financed and exposes loan amount and lender at the Scout+ tier.
Frequently asked
Is ACRIS free?
Yes. Browsing and searching ACRIS at acris.nyc.gov is free. Document images download as PDFs at no charge. NYC DOF charges a fee only for certified copies.
How current is ACRIS data?
Documents typically appear within 30–60 days of recording. The NYC Open Data export (Real Property Master, dataset bnx9-e6tj) is refreshed monthly. The official ACRIS web search is closer to real-time but is rate-limited.
What is the difference between ACRIS and PLUTO?
ACRIS is the transaction history (deeds, mortgages, liens). PLUTO is NYC Department of City Planning’s snapshot of every tax lot’s physical attributes — building class, year built, lot size, unit count. Both are keyed by BBL and are typically used together.
Does ACRIS cover Staten Island?
Yes. ACRIS covers all five boroughs of New York City for documents recorded from 1966 onward.
Why does MetroDeeds use ACRIS data?
ACRIS is the authoritative public record of NYC property transfers. MetroDeeds ingests the daily ACRIS feed, joins it to NYC HPD registration contacts, NYS DOS entity records, and DOF assessments, and surfaces the connections ACRIS itself does not make explicit — like which LLCs trace back to a single named operator.