40 terms, defined plainly

The legal instrument that transfers ownership of real property from one party to another, recorded with the county so the transfer is public. A deed names who transferred, who received, and what was transferred. It is the primary evidence of who owns a property and it is a public record in every US state.

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The grantor is the party giving up an interest in the property; the grantee is the party receiving it. On a sale the grantor is the seller and the grantee is the buyer. Reading these two fields in order is how you follow a chain of title backwards through time.

A deed in which the grantor guarantees they hold clear title and will defend it against claims. It is the normal instrument in an arm's length sale, so its presence suggests a real market transaction rather than a transfer between related parties.

A deed transferring whatever interest the grantor has, with no guarantee that they have any. Common between family members, into and out of trusts, and in divorces. A quitclaim into an entity with a similar name to the owner usually indicates estate planning rather than a sale.

A trust arrangement holding title to real property, often with the beneficiary's identity kept off the public record. Widely used for privacy and estate planning. The recorded owner is the trust or its trustee, so the deed is true, complete, and gives you no person to contact.

The party holding legal title to trust property and administering it. A trustee may be the beneficiary, a family member, a lawyer, or a corporate trust company. Treating a trustee as the owner is the single most common error in property research, because a professional trustee is frequently unrelated to the wealth involved.

The person who actually benefits from an asset, as opposed to whoever holds legal title. With a trust or an LLC, the recorded owner and the beneficial owner are usually different, and the beneficial owner is the one worth identifying. Finding them is the object of entity piercing.

The person or company designated to receive legal documents on behalf of an entity. Commercial registered agents serve thousands of unrelated entities, so an agent's name on a filing tells you nothing about ownership. Reporting one as the owner of a property is a failure mode worth knowing about, because plenty of tools do it.

A state whose business filings do not require members or managers to be named publicly, so an LLC registered there can be genuinely opaque. Wyoming, Delaware, New Mexico and Nevada are the ones that matter in practice. Property held through an entity in one of these states often cannot be resolved from registry data alone.

A confident, fluent statement from a language model that no source it read actually supports. It looks identical to a correct answer, which is what makes it dangerous in research: the failure is rarely an obvious error, it is a plausible name, date or figure that nobody supplied. Plotbook's countermeasures are its disambiguation gate and its resolution tiers.

How the research agent works

An architecture that fetches documents from a source and puts them in front of a language model before it answers, so the answer is grounded in retrieved text rather than in training data alone. It reduces invention without removing it, because a model can still misread a passage or fill the gaps between two of them.

The maximum amount of text a language model can hold in view at once, counted in tokens and covering the instructions, any documents supplied, and the conversation so far. When a task exceeds it something is dropped, usually the earliest material, and the model gives no signal that it stopped seeing it.

A reusable bundle of instructions, and sometimes scripts or reference files, that an AI agent loads when it meets a task the bundle covers. It packages a procedure once instead of re-explaining it in every prompt. The term is new enough that vendors define it differently, so check what a given product means by it.

Plotbook neither publishes nor runs agent skills. Its research agent is a fixed loop over a defined set of tools and per-entity playbooks, not an extensible system you can add your own procedures to.

Software that joins or records a client meeting, transcribes it, and drafts a summary, a follow-up email, or a CRM note from the transcript. Everything it produces starts from a meeting that already happened, which is what separates the category from anything that helps you find someone worth meeting.

Plotbook does no recording, transcription, meeting capture, or note drafting of any kind. It works upstream of the meeting, from a property record rather than from a conversation.

An attack in which instructions hidden inside content a model reads, a web page, a document, an email, get followed as though the user had issued them. Any tool that lets a model read untrusted text carries this exposure, and the general defence is to treat everything fetched as data rather than as instructions.

The design rule that an AI system's output is evidence for a person to judge rather than an action the system takes by itself. It is the standing answer to every term above it, and it is why a Plotbook research run ends at a profile with its sources shown: there is no sending, dialing or sequencing, so nothing it produces reaches anybody unless a person decides it should.

Written for compliance reviewers

Appending contact details to a name and address, usually in bulk and usually for pennies per record. It answers how to reach someone. It does not answer who they are, what they do, or what they are worth, and it makes no attempt to resolve an entity to a person.

Plotbook does not sell skip tracing and its per-record economics are far worse than a skip tracing tool's. For bulk contact appending, a property platform such as PropStream or Propwire is the correct purchase.

Plotbook vs PropStream

Taking a list of people you already have, typically donors or clients, and scoring them for capacity to give or invest. It is the dominant model in nonprofit prospect research and enterprise wealth data, and it starts from a name. It cannot tell you about anyone who is not already on your list.

Plotbook vs WealthEngine

A trigger event suggesting assets are about to move: a business sale, an IPO, an inheritance, a job change, a divorce. Several advisor prospecting tools are built entirely around detecting these. It is a timing signal about a person you can already identify, which is a different question from who owns a given property.

Plotbook has no trigger event detection, no alerts, and no monitoring of any kind. It answers who owns the wealth in a geography, not when someone's circumstances changed.

The geography a professional works deliberately and repeatedly: a set of ZIP codes, a suburb, a school catchment. Long-standing practice in real estate and increasingly in advice, because working one area systematically compounds local recognition in a way that buying leads never does.

For private wealth advisors