The Series· No. 40 · Act X — The Community Record

By DocuSeller · Published

The Record
DocuSeller · No. 40

The record the sale hangs on

Every disclosure answers one question. What does this owner owe on this unit, as of this date.

Three facts. The join between the first two is its own record.

It's called an ownership. It has a start date, and sooner or later an end date.

A single unit has successive ownership periods with the current period selected as of the disclosure date One unit, successive ownershipsExample timelinePreviousCurrentNextAs of today
Three owners, one house, and one very specific Tuesday in the middle.

Because a house has had owners before, and will have owners after, and on exactly one day in between somebody wires a great deal of money based on which of them is current.

So we hold all three separately.

The unit is the property. Unit number, lot, block, the address as it's actually posted, whether anyone is living in it, and small badges for open violations, open work orders and money owed.

An individual and a trust represent two owner types with their own contact records An owner can be eitherTrustIndividualEntityEach has its own contact records
Both of these own a house. Only one of them will ever answer the phone.

The owner is a person. Or isn't — plenty of homes are owned by a trust, an estate or a company, so an owner is either an individual or an entity. Either way they get as many email addresses and phone numbers as they really have, instead of one of each because the form only had one box.

An owner also carries every unit they own, and every unit they used to own.

That last part isn't archival trivia. It's the defect from post two — a payment applied to the previous owner after a sale — stopped at the source.

An ownership isn't a field on a house. It's a record with a start, an end, and consequences.
An ownership record with start and end dates connects a distinct unit record to a distinct owner record The relationship has its own datesOwnershipStart dateEnd dateUnitOwnerMatch the owner, unit, and disclosure date
House here, owner there, and the dated card in the middle that decides whose money it is.

And then the part we deliberately never keep: resale status.

At the moment a disclosure is generated, we ask the accounting system, live, for the standing of that unit's accounts. Each one on its own line, saying what it says today.

Not one comfortable total somebody copied down last Tuesday and grew fond of.

An illustrative resale-status sheet shows four separate account standings read live for the disclosure Read each account live at disclosureExample account standingOperatingCurrentReserveDueSpecial assessmentDueOther accountCurrentSeparate account lines, read from the source
Four accounts. Four answers. Nobody adds them up in their head.

Underneath the standing sit three dates. When the assessment was last paid, and for how much. What the next one comes to, and when it falls due. And the date the account is paid through. A balance says where the account stood. The paid-through date says how far forward the owner is actually covered — and the day after it belongs to the buyer. Asked live too, and kept nowhere.

A stale record doesn't produce a wrong document. It produces a confident one.

Next: everything in a community that is neither a unit nor an owner, and still turns up in a disclosure question.

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