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For Journalists: Sourcing, Data Access, and Citation Protocol

Keystone Court Data tracks county-level court filings (foreclosure, probate, partition, guardianship, divorce) across multiple US states. Newsrooms covering real estate distress, housing market trends, or local court activity are welcome to cite our reports, request custom data pulls, or use our public APIs.

What we track

Pre-foreclosure complaints and lis pendens filings, deduplicated and verified against tax-assessor ownership records
Probate openings when the decedent owned real estate
Pre-probate (obituary-sourced) where the deceased owned property and probate has not yet opened
Partition actions (forced co-owner sale)
Guardianship filings with potential real-estate implications
Divorce filings involving jointly owned real property
Lifecycle data (median days complaint to served, complaint to judgment, settlement rates) where docket monitoring is enabled
Plaintiff (lender) activity normalized to canonical entity names

Sourcing protocol

Our data comes directly from official county clerk-of-court portals, tax assessor records, and county GIS parcel feeds, as outlined in our methodology page. We do not relicense third-party data; we extract, normalize, and verify primary source records. When citing our reports, please reference the underlying public source if your story requires fully primary-source provenance.

For data fields beyond what's published in our reports (custom date windows, additional counties, specific zip-code rollups, longitudinal trend data): contact carson@keystonecourtdata.com with the angle and deadline. We can typically respond to journalism requests within 48 hours at no charge for non-commercial editorial use.

Citation

Preferred citation format:

Keystone Court Data, "[Report Title]", [URL], accessed [Date].

Inline: "according to Keystone Court Data, a court-records intelligence service tracking foreclosure and probate filings across [N] US states" is accurate.

Public data access

Reports hub with state-by-state intelligence, top-markets rankings, and research notes
Bulk CSV downloads per state (open data, free)
Public API for programmatic access (rate-limited, free)
RSS feed of new reports
Court filings glossary if you need to explain a term for a lay audience

Story angles we can support

Geographic concentration: which counties or ZIP codes drive a state's foreclosure rate
Lender behavior: which banks and servicers file the most actions in your coverage area
Lifecycle and timing: how long the foreclosure process actually takes from filing to sale
Non-resident-owner share: the fraction of distressed properties owned by out-of-area investors or via inheritance, versus owner-occupants
Pre-foreclosure visibility gap: why the national real estate aggregators show bank-owned foreclosure data but rarely pre-foreclosure (covered in this research note)

Recent newsroom-relevant reports

Contact

Editorial / press requests: carson@keystonecourtdata.com

Founder, Carson Nordmann, available for on-record interviews on real estate distress data, court-records intelligence methodology, and pre-foreclosure visibility.