CoreLogic: property and housing microdata (licensed)

Licensed: not exercised here

CoreLogic is a licensed commercial dataset (CoreLogic, rebranded Cotality), so it carries no provenance badge: the access path below was not run in this session (no CoreLogic credentials were available). The page documents the access route and the gotchas; treat it as unverified until someone exercises it through a licensed account. This is the honest grade under the institute’s Verified discipline.

CoreLogic is a US property and housing microdata provider. Its research-relevant content includes property-level deed records (arms-length sale transactions with prices and dates), tax and assessor files (property characteristics and assessed values), repeat-sales house-price indices, and foreclosure data at the property and zip-code level. It appears across housing-finance research: used in, for example Amaral, Dohmen, Kohl & Schularick for deeds and repeat-sales transactions across 248 MSAs to estimate idiosyncratic housing-price risk, Piazzesi for the cross-section of idiosyncratic capital gains on individual houses, and Heitz, Martin & Ufier for zip-code monthly foreclosure rates as a local-stress measure.

• Cost: licensed, subscription. No free tier.
• Vendor: CoreLogic (rebranded Cotality in 2025).
• Coverage: US residential and commercial property, with deed, assessor, HPI, and foreclosure modules; county-level depth and history vary.

Access (when licensed)

• Direct from CoreLogic / Cotality. Through their data files, platform, or a cloud data share, keyed on the CoreLogic property identifier (CLIP).
• Possibly via a research data provider. Some institutions reach CoreLogic microdata through licensed academic arrangements; availability is not confirmed here, so check with your library before assuming a given path.
• Credentials are required either way. Keep them in .env, never hard-coded.

Gotchas (the ones that bite pipelines)

These are the failure modes to expect; they are documented, not verified here.

• County coverage is uneven across time and geography. Recording practices differ by county, and several non-disclosure states (for example Texas) do not release transaction prices, so price coverage has structural holes. Check coverage for your counties and period before reading gaps as no activity.
• Deed and assessor files are separate and must be joined. Transactions (deeds) and property characteristics (assessor) live in different files; join on the CoreLogic property identifier (CLIP) and confirm the match before treating a sale as fully attributed.
• Repeat-sales needs at least two arms-length sales. Repeat-sales indices and price-risk estimates require the same property selling twice at arms length; properties that transact once, or only through non-arms-length transfers, drop out, which selects toward more-traded properties.
• Distinguish arms-length sales from transfers. The deed file includes intra-family transfers, refinancings, and foreclosure-related transfers that are not market sales; filter on transaction type before computing returns.
• Foreclosure data is aggregated geographically. Foreclosure measures are often used at the zip-code or county level; state the geography and the monthly definition so the stress measure is reproducible.
• Files are large and get refreshed. Property microdata is voluminous and periodically restated; pin the data vintage and re-pull deliberately rather than mixing refreshes.

Citation

Cite the product and vendor, e.g.: CoreLogic property data, CoreLogic (Cotality); data licensed and accessed YYYY-MM-DD. State the data vintage, the module (deed, assessor, HPI, or foreclosure), the geography, and the transaction-type filter used.