Every number here came from a county record
PlotFact pulls each county's own systems and refreshes daily. Here's exactly what we cover, where it comes from, and what we do when a field is missing.
| County | Parcels and owners | Tax and delinquency | Sales | Deed chain | Permits | Code cases | Flood |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wake 456,535 parcels | Yes | Yes (daily) | Partial 83% | Limited 6% | Yes | Raleigh only | Yes 100% |
| Durham 133,544 parcels | Yes | Yes (daily) | Partial 52% | Not yet | Yes | Yes | Yes 100% |
| Orange 58,980 parcels | Yes | Yes (daily) | Yes 99% | Not yet | Not yet | Not yet | Yes 100% |
| Johnston 126,734 parcels | Yes, with beds/baths | Yes (daily) | Yes 98% | Partial 93% | Not yet | Not yet | Yes 100% |
"Not yet" means exactly that — we hold none of it for that county, and the property page shows an empty state rather than a guess. Permits and code enforcement in Orange and Johnston are split across several municipal systems; integrating one town and calling the county covered would be worse than showing nothing. "Raleigh only" means Wake code cases come from the City of Raleigh's open-data portal, so Cary, Apex, Wake Forest and Garner have none. Deed chain is the named grantor/grantee ownership history; where it says "Not yet" you still get the recorded sale price and date.
The percentages are measured from the database this page is served from, not written by hand — the share of that county's parcels for which we actually hold the field. "Yes" is 95% or better, "Partial" 40% or better, "Limited" below 40%, and "Not yet" means we hold none of it at all. Sales, deed chain and flood are counted this way because every parcel is supposed to have one; permits and code cases are not, because most parcels have never pulled a permit and that is normal — for those, the column says whether we integrate that county's system at all. Wake's deed chain is genuinely thin today: it is built from deeds as they are recorded, so it grows nightly rather than arriving complete.
One consequence worth stating plainly: the motivated-seller score can only weigh the signals a county actually publishes, so a parcel in Orange or Johnston cannot earn code-case points. Those counties score lower than Wake or Durham for reasons of coverage, not condition.
County Tax Administration bulk records, county GIS and parcel systems, Registers of Deeds, municipal permit and code-enforcement systems, and FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. We integrate each county from its own systems rather than a statewide aggregator, because the aggregators lag and drop fields.
We would rather show nothing than show something wrong. Prices come from recorded excise stamps, not estimates dressed as facts. Owner and portfolio matches are made on the recorded entity, not a fuzzy name match. Derived numbers — ARV, motivated-seller score, estimated equity — are labelled as informational models, not appraisals.
When a field is genuinely missing at the source, we show a dash. Never a fabricated value.
We capture a new snapshot of each county's records every day and diff it against yesterday's — that's how Fresh Signals knows what just changed. Every property page shows a per-source "as of" date, so you always know how current each piece of data is. County systems themselves lag reality by days, and we show the true date rather than implying it's live.
All data is public record, provided as-is for research — not a title search, appraisal or legal advice. Verify with official county sources before making an offer. See our Terms for the full disclaimer.