Every closing, on the record.

Closings to date

How this ledger works

Anyone can claim a track record; almost no one in this business publishes one. Here is the standard every entry on this page has to meet, written down before entry #1 exists so we can never bend it after the fact:

Every closing gets listed. The smooth seven-day closings and the ones that took longer than we hoped. A ledger you curate is a brochure, not a ledger.

Real details, seller's privacy protected. Each entry shows the area (neighborhood or town — never the exact address), the timeline from offer to closing, and the situation type. A sale price appears only with the seller's written permission.

Nothing invented, ever. No stock-photo "sold" houses, no made-up counts, no composite stories. The same standards we commit to in writing before a deal apply to how we talk about it afterward.

How to verify any sale yourself, straight from the county

Every closing in this business ends the same way: a deed gets recorded with the county where the house sits. That record is public and it is kept by a government office with no stake in anyone's marketing — which is why no website, ours included, can fake it. Here is how to pull one, using Cook County, Illinois (our home county) as the worked example:

1. Find the county's recording office. In Cook County, deeds are recorded with the Cook County Clerk's Recordings Division — the office that took over the former Cook County Recorder of Deeds. Its official online records search is reachable from the Clerk's website, cookcountyclerkil.gov; make sure you land on the county's own site, not a paid lookup service impersonating it.

2. Search by property or by name. Cook County's search lets you look records up by the property's PIN — the 14-digit Property Index Number printed on any property tax bill — or by the names of the parties. To check what a company has actually bought, search its name as the grantee (the buyer on a deed): every property it really purchased shows a recorded deed with a date. Searching the index is free; counties only charge a small fee for copies of the documents.

3. Read what the record tells you. The index shows the document type (a sale records as a deed), the recording date, the grantor (the seller) and the grantee (the buyer). If a company claims it closed on a house and no deed ever hit the county's books, the sale did not happen the way they tell it.

4. Outside Cook County, same idea. Depending on the state, the office is called the County Recorder, Recorder of Deeds, Register of Deeds, or County Clerk. Search the county's name plus "recorder" or "deed search" and use the official government site; most counties offer a free online index search, and any that don't will run a grantor/grantee name search if you call or visit.