ACRIS commercial mortgage search: a broker's guide to the NYC register (2026)

ACRIS is the free public register of every document recorded against real property in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens — mortgages, consolidation agreements, satisfactions, assignments, deeds — searchable by building, by party or by document number. It indexes the document type, the amount, the dates and the parties. It does not index the maturity, the rate or whether the loan is still open: only 47% of plain mortgages state a maturity anywhere in the instrument.

For a broker, ACRIS is three different tools depending on the question. For this building, it is excellent, and the single-building walkthrough is a separate guide. For this borrower or this lender, it works, with care about names. For every loan coming due in Brooklyn next year, it cannot answer at all, because the thing you would filter on is not in the index. This guide is about the second and third questions: how to search by party, what the result list is really telling you, how to use the open-data mirror, and where the search stops.

What the index holds, and what only the scan does

Each recorded document gets one row in the index: a document ID, a CRFN (the City Register File Number, stamped at recording), a document type, a document date and a recording date, a document amount, one or more parties, and one or more lots (borough, block and lot). Everything else about the loan — the term, the maturity, the rate, the prepayment terms, who signed — is inside the scanned image, which ACRIS serves page by page and does not transcribe.

The document types that matter for debt:

The ACRIS document types a broker reads for debt. Stated-maturity shares from 13,249 instruments read, September 2026.

ACRIS never says a mortgage is commercial. A $3 million mortgage on a six-unit walk-up and a $3 million mortgage on a single-family house look identical in the index; the property's use comes from PLUTO (the city's tax-lot file, with units, floor area and building class), and the borrower's nature from the party name. A third of every raw "NYC commercial mortgage" list is somebody's apartment for exactly this reason.

Searching by borrower or by lender

Open Document Search and choose Party Name. You pick a borough or all four, a date range, a document class, and type the name. Three things decide whether this finds what you want.

Names are as recorded, and recorders type. The same borrower appears as "141 WEST 28 OWNER LLC", "141 W 28TH OWNER LLC" and "141 WEST 28TH STREET OWNER, LLC" across three filings. Search the distinctive part ("141 W") rather than the full legal name, then read the lots on each hit to confirm it is the same building. A lender is worse: a bank files under its own name, its predecessor's, and whichever subsidiary originated the loan, and a securitised loan is assigned to a trust whose name is a string of letters and the year. Searching a lender's name finds its mortgages; it does not find the loans it still holds, which are the ones assigned away minus the ones assigned in.

Party 1 is the mortgagor, Party 2 the mortgagee, and a consolidation agreement lists both sides as both. The Parties file also carries an address for each party, which for the borrower is the mailing address the LLC gave on the instrument — usually where its principal receives mail, and the single most useful address in the register for finding the person behind an LLC.

A party search returns documents, not loans. A borrower with one building that has refinanced twice shows a dozen rows: the original mortgages, the gap mortgages, the agreements that consolidated them, the satisfactions of what was consolidated, the assignments between. One open loan, twelve documents. Reading the twelve into one is the job of the next section.

Reading a result list into open loans

Sort by document date and work newest first.

1. Find the newest AGMT or M&CON on the lot. That is the current loan if there is one; its amount is the consolidated principal. Every MTGE it cites — in its own text, and in the References file — is a part of it, not a separate loan, however large.
2. Check what has been satisfied. A SAT cites by CRFN. In a consolidated loan the satisfaction names the gap note and the old notes, never the agreement, so the agreement is paid off when any note it folded in is: a pipeline that waits for a satisfaction of the AGMT itself waits forever. Our weekly check retires a consolidation the moment a satisfaction of any of its notes is recorded; the rule, applied on September 21, 2026, closed 5,826 New York loans (3.7%) that every document-ID match had left open, and 20 of 20 spot checks held.
3. Follow the assignments. An ASST after the mortgage moves the lien to a new holder. The loan is the same; the lender you would call is not.
4. A later DEED, then a new MTGE — a sale with new financing. The old loan is almost always paid at closing; the satisfaction may record weeks later.
5. Several lots on one document — a blanket mortgage. The loan is one; the collateral is many. A partial release later frees one lot and leaves the loan open. How to read those is its own post.

What you have at the end is the open loans on the building, their lenders of record, their principal, and the instruments to open for everything else. For a single building this is ten minutes of work. The guide to reading the instrument takes it from there: where the maturity clause sits if there is one, where the rate rider is, which page names who signed.

The open-data mirror

Everything in the index is also on NYC Open Data as five files, updated daily: Master (one row per document: type, amount, dates), Legals (document to lot), Parties (names and addresses), References (a later document to the one it cites, by CRFN), and a document-type lookup. For one building the website is faster. For a borrower with many buildings, a lender's book or a neighbourhood, the files are the right tool: filter Legals to the lots, join Master for the types and amounts, Parties for the names, References to retire what has been satisfied. The join is the whole difficulty — References keys on CRFN and the other files on document ID — and the data goes back to 1966, which means decades of instruments cited by reel and page that no CRFN will ever match.

Two limits survive the join. The files carry no maturity, so a borrower-wide view still has to open each instrument to learn when anything comes due. And they carry no building attributes, so "commercial" still means a join to PLUTO.

What no ACRIS search can do

The question a broker actually asks — which commercial loans in Brooklyn mature in the next twelve months? — has no ACRIS answer, because the register has no maturity field to filter on. Getting to it means reading the instrument of every open loan, which for the four boroughs is about 124,000 active commercial loans over $1 million, and keeping each one checked against the satisfactions, consolidations and assignments recorded since. That is the pipeline Circlemark runs weekly: the maturity read from the instrument and cited to its page where it is stated, a modelled estimate marked ≈ where it is not, and every lifecycle event matched by CRFN so a paid loan leaves the list the week its satisfaction records. The result, borough by borough, is on the county pages — Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens — and the list builder behind each one opens without an account. For one address, the free lookup does the ten minutes above in a few seconds and shows the pages it read.