Why is home property information so public?

I think one reason is historically, if you and I own property next to each other but you pay twice the property tax that I pay, the public might have an interest in knowing who I was and how I got a sweetheart assessment.

If you want to obfuscate your ownership i imagine you could create a trust or LLC and transfer and sell your direct ownership to the new entity. This might have some short and long term tax implications and I would consult a tak expert.

Many ranches were i like are now owned by family trusts i assume for inheritance reasons.

I do not have an answer for your specific question and I am not an expert on this but for what it's worth one can purchase properties in the name of a trust or a business. It will still be public but a trust can be anonymously named in some states. This can have property tax implications depending on the type of trust and the state so review the options in your location with a lawyer knowledgeable in trusts and property taxes.

Why would they publish names? It's really no value to home buyers to see the name associated with a listing. In some cases, there are antidiscrimination laws that limit what information should be disclosed to sellers and buyers. Name might be one of those.

Because people have been living in houses for millennia and such an idea of privacy would only have emerged in the last few decades.

1. The Public needs to know if they are permitted to be at a place or not. Or even if they can claim it. Homesteading in the US (claiming public land as private land) only ended in 1986. 2. Because police need to know who belongs at a place, and who to exclude. 3. The government wants to know who to tax for the land. 4. Generally, we think the government's information should be publicly available, not hidden.

I don’t think the name is important for Zillow site visitors so they don’t publish it. The value and features are important.

I imagine Zillow sells marketing databases with actual names.

And of course you can just go to the county assessor to look up the name. But I don’t think Zillow even links to their source.

Well the tax assessment is public probably so that people can see that the government is acting honestly.

I don’t know if there’s a particularly good reason for ownership to be public. Some countries only have transaction dates/prices but not names published. Some countries make everyone’s individual tax returns publicly available. I don’t know why the us found this particular balance.

I assume that Zillow would get a load of angry emails if they published ownership information and it isn’t worth enough to them to publish it.

The United States has a policy about government data - including weather (e.g. NOAA) and GPS, to be made freely available to the public. Your property data, collected at the county level, falls under this category so they are accessible to everyone.

However, I think Zillow would be prevented from publishing the owner name, since it would probably be classified as Personal Identifiable Information (PII).

Why wouldn't ownership be public? See the recent uproar[0] over the semi-anonymous purchase of land near Travis AFB. This is a clear case where market inefficiency is bad; individual sellers need to know when markets are changing and a single entity is willing to pay above assumed market rates for a large contiguous region. Anyone in favor of strong markets should favor full transparency of real estate ownership and transactions. My fear is that otherwise we'll revert to de facto feudalism where the wealthiest entities can acquire and lease out virtually all real property.

[0] https://www.kqed.org/news/11957208/near-1-billion-land-purch...

[delayed]

Probably the biggest reason would be so that when you buy a property you can independently confirm the vendor actually owns it.

In Canada the MLS Canada and title ownership is gated by realtors and expensive fees which gives them all the power to control the narrative.

you want your ownership of multiple properties that you dont contribute value to but earn equity in on the backs of renters to be private so you don’t get spam? or is there another reason?

Lawyer here. Land ownership has to be public because the only way to establish your right to property is the publicly recorded and government maintained "chain of title": who you are, who you got it from, who they got it from, etc., going back to the original survey of your state (or at least 50 years, where I am). Otherwise it would be chaos with everyone waiving around 100-year-old bogus deeds claiming the right to kick you out of your house. Tax records too, as someone else mentioned - everyone can verify whether or not the assessed tax is valid and the property valuation isn't made up to punish you for stepping on the toes of some county official. There are ways to obfuscate the individuals who actually own a particular piece of land (trusts, LLCs and such), but the chain of title needs to be available to anyone.

New Zealand recently had a minor controversy, where Owner (names) public datasets were used by third parties to create a searchable "What (else) Does My Landlord Own?" -style website, riding on a current of anti-rich-landlord sentiment in the midst of that countrys rising property price issues.

That happening raised discussion similar to this, and sparked the governments land data department to investigate the suitability of allowing public access to such data. Ultimately, so far, they have decided to keep the status quo - the data is available, but its usage is governed by reference to overarching Privacy legislation, which defines acceptable privacy standards and gives a legal pathway for abuse to be prosecuted.

Incidentally: due to many rental properties being owned in the name of Trusts, Mom-n-Pop shell companies, and the like, a simple search by person-name only provides a partial result anyway, in this context.

Land property ownership is a very strong and very old form of ownership. Lot of countries the property registries have survived wars, regime changes, civil wars and 100s of years of dispute between neighbors.

When not public, this would surely not work or would not be accepted.

In my country looking up the registry costs like $25 ... So mass exploitation is not really that easy

So that private interests can figure out how to do exactly that--contact the owner of property they'd like to own or drill on or obtain water from or get an easement through or put wind turbines on?

Edit: blatguzzler's sounds more foundational.

In general property that is owned via registration (land, domain names, copyright, trademark, patents) has public ownership listing. While property that is owned by possession (i.e. you are holding it) does not.

I just use a corporation, which is simple to set up. Some journalist could track it down, but random spammers and such have no idea.

You don't have to set up the company in your home state either. You can use one of the states with more privacy (e.g WY).

> Zillow ... publish all other information about the property and its history?

Among the info published are photos taken when the property was last on the market for sale. It's possible for the new owner to register as such, ask for and be notified by Zillow that the photos have been taken down.

Owner may then discover some months later that the photos are back online again.