PropertyShark

What PropertyShark knows about you

PropertyShark is a property-records site. Type in an address and it returns the owner's name, the price they paid, the purchase date, the assessed value, the tax history, the lot size, the zoning, and the bank that holds the mortgage. Type in an owner's name and it returns the address. The lookup works both ways.

The data comes from county assessor and recorder offices, combined with commercial real estate feeds. Anyone with a free account can pull the file. Yardi Systems, a real estate software company, bought PropertyShark in 2010.

Why it matters if you're on the job

Property sites work address-first. Anyone who already has your street address, whether from a traffic stop, a court filing, or a social media post, can pull your whole household file: your spouse's name, what you paid, and who holds your mortgage. Your financial profile sits right next to your home address.

Search engines make it worse. A home purchase can show up in results under the owner's name not long after closing. If you moved to the suburbs to keep your address private, that record undoes it.

The mortgage detail is the part people miss. If someone knows which bank holds your mortgage, that's one more detail they can use to pose as you on a call to that lender.

How to opt out

PropertyShark has no self-serve opt-out form. Removal is by request. Email support@propertyshark.com and ask them to remove the property record and owner details for privacy reasons. Include your full name, the property address, and the listing URL.

You can ask them to process it under the California Consumer Privacy Act, a California law that lets residents tell a company to delete their personal information. Yardi's privacy policy says it honors deletion requests under that law and others. If you're not a California resident, ask them to honor the request anyway.

If email goes unanswered, Yardi's privacy policy also lists a Privacy Feedback web form, a phone line, and a mailing address for deletion requests.

One limit: PropertyShark rebuilds from the county recorder feed. If the public record still shows your name, the listing can come back. Full steps are in the list above.

How long until you're back

The removal suppresses the listing that's up now. It doesn't stop the next sync from the county. A refinance, a deed change, or a tax reassessment can rebuild the record within a few months. Treat 12 months as a working estimate, not a guarantee.

The durable fix is to work both ends. File the broker removal, then pursue address redaction at the county level. Several states give covered public servants a way to keep their home address out of public view:

• Texas Tax Code 25.025 lets peace officers, judges, and other covered people ask their county appraisal district to keep their home address confidential in property records.
• New Jersey's Daniel's Law lets officers, judges, prosecutors, and immediate family in the same household require data brokers and agencies to stop disclosing their home address and unpublished phone number.
• Florida Statutes 119.071 exempts the home addresses of sworn officers, firefighters, and several other roles from public records.

The broker removal clears what's showing now. The county redaction slows the refill.

What we do that's faster

We file the PropertyShark removal request, follow up if they don't respond, and keep re-checking the listing. When the county feed pushes your record back, we re-file. We also check whether your state has an address-redaction program you qualify for and walk you through the county filing. We run the same process across the other data broker sites we monitor.

We handle most of this. If a site needs something only you can provide, like an ID to verify the request, we'll tell you clearly.