Why the state line changes the whole read
Almost every guide to working a territory is written as though property records were a national system. They are not. They are roughly three thousand county systems operating under fifty sets of state law, and the differences are not cosmetic.
In an open-record state you can see what a house sold for, when, and to whom, and build a picture of a street's turnover from public data alone. In a non-disclosure state that price does not exist in the public record, so the same exercise gives you an assessed value and a transfer date and nothing about consideration. In a state with a strict assessment cap, the assessed value itself is a lagging indicator that says as much about how long somebody has owned the place as about what it is worth.
None of that is obscure, and all of it is free to know. It is just rarely written down in one place, because the people who write about prospecting usually work in one state and assume it generalises.
Ownership form is the fork in the road
Once you are actually reading records in an area, the single most useful thing on the page is not the value. It is what kind of thing is named as the owner.
A natural person means the record already answered your question. A revocable or family trust usually means the household holds its own home through an estate plan, and the trustee is very often the person you were looking for. An LLC or corporation is the real work, and how much work depends entirely on where it was formed. An estate means the owner died and the property is moving through probate, which is a court record and a different route. An institution, a bank, an HOA, a government body, means there is no household there at all and the parcel is not worth another minute.
A territory where most of the top of the market sits behind entities is not a worse territory. It is a territory where the work is worth more, because almost nobody else has done it.
The honest ceiling on any territory read
A property record is a record of a property. It is not a statement about a household's finances, and the gap between the two is wider than most prospecting material admits.
It shows no accounts, no portfolios, no business interests, no debt and no income. It cannot see a mortgage balance, so it cannot tell equity from leverage. It cannot see the person who rents an ordinary house while running a company worth far more than the street. And ranking an area's parcels by assessed value produces a list of expensive houses, which overlaps with, but is not the same as, a list of wealthy households.
That ceiling is worth stating before you start rather than discovering later, because it decides what a territory read is for. It is a way to find households worth a conversation. It is not, and cannot be, a measurement of anybody's wealth.