Can a private property database show more information than the county website?

Short answer: yes. Those aggregators don't just pull from one county site. They scrape recorder deeds, tax liens, voter files, utility hookups, and old cached pages. The county website is often ghe most sanitized version because they're the ones with a privacy policy.

Previous owner chains usually come from recorded deeds, not the assessor's parcel viewer. Deeds are public at the recorder's office even when the assessor site hides stuff. People conflate the two.

Correct. Homestead redaction is county-specific and usually only covers the assessor/treasurer display. The deed still has your name on it and the aggregators grab it. If you actually want separation, you buy through an entity, but that's a whole other conversation.

Genuinely curious how a paie site would have a mailing address the county redacted. Either the county redacted it later and the aggregator cached the pre-redaction version, or someone bought it from a data broker. Both are plausible and both are annoying.

Caching is the boring answer and probably the right one most of the time. Those services have archives going back year. A redaction implemented in 2021 does nothing about the 2016 snapshot.

I ran a test on my own property last year. County site: name, parcel, tax status. Three commercial databases: name, two prior owners, a phone number that I never gave to any county, and an estimated mortgage balance. The phone number was the part that got me. That's not a public record, that's a broker.

Estimated mortgage balance is usually derived from the recorded deed of trust plus a payoff model. It's a guess dressed up as data. Don't trust it.

The phone number is likely from a marketing opt-in you forgot about or a credit header. Those databases cross-reference each other constantly. This is why I tell people the county website is the le ast of their problems.

I assumed credit header, yeah. It's just wild that a property search surfaces it. Anyway, Opt out requests took about three weeks per site. Tedious but it worked for the phone number.

Off-topic but does anyone else find the county GIS portals borderline unusable? The one near me needs a plugin that hasn't been updated since 2014. Paid database wins on usability alone even if the data is shadier.

The GIS portals are a nightmare. I'll give the aggregators that. But usability doesn't change the fact that they're republishing records the county deliberately obscured. Whether that matters depends on your threat model. If it's just nosy neighbors, the free site is fine. If it's someone with a specific grudge, assume everything is out there and plan accordingly.