Searching Allegheny County Property Records
Allegheny County covers Pittsburgh and about 130 surrounding municipalities, and a property search here runs into two things a searcher from elsewhere will not expect. The office that holds the recorded documents is not called what you would guess, and the ground under a great many parcels was sold away from the surface long before anyone alive today owned it.
The office is the Department of Real Estate
Most Pennsylvania counties keep recorded documents with a Recorder of Deeds. Allegheny County consolidated that function into its Department of Real Estate, which is where deeds, mortgages and their satisfactions, liens, easements, plans, and recorded agreements are indexed. It is the primary source for any title search of an Allegheny parcel, and searching for a recorder's office by that name will not find it.
The rest sits elsewhere in the county and the municipalities. Assessment and property tax records are administered separately, and with roughly 130 municipalities and dozens of school districts levying their own taxes, delinquency can exist at more than one level against the same parcel. Code enforcement and permit files are municipal, so a question about an unpermitted addition in Mount Lebanon is a borough request rather than a county one.
Coal is the regional complication
Western Pennsylvania sits over the Pittsburgh coal seam, and mineral severances here are old, numerous, and consequential. A deed from the 1890s or 1900s conveying the surface while reserving the coal, together with the right to mine it, is entirely ordinary in this county, and the reservation runs with the land to every later owner.
Pennsylvania law responds to that history directly. Deeds in bituminous coal areas are required to carry a notice regarding coal rights, warning the buyer that the surface may not include the coal and that mining could affect the surface. Its presence in a deed is a strong signal that a severance exists somewhere in the chain, and its absence is a finding worth noting rather than a reassurance.
The practical consequence for a buyer or a lender is that a current owner search will not reach a 1902 reservation. A term long enough to find the severing instrument is the only way that question gets answered, and on parcels where subsidence or support rights matter it is worth the cost.
Support rights are the part that turns an abstract reservation into a practical one. Where the right to remove the coal was reserved without an obligation to leave support for the surface, the owner above may have less protection than they assume, and whether a particular reservation did that is a question of wording rather than of custom.
What a title search on an Allegheny parcel returns
An abstractor establishes the chain of ownership over the term searched, identifies the mortgages and whether any have been satisfied, and pulls the recorded liens, judgments docketed against the owner names supplied, and any state or federal tax liens indexed against the parcel.
- The legal description and how it has been described across the chain, which on older city parcels frequently predates the current plans.
- Recorded easements for access and utilities, plus any covenants or building restrictions binding the parcel.
- Mineral and coal reservations found of record, with the instruments attached so the wording can be read rather than summarized.
Scoping the search before you order
Send the street address and the municipality, the parcel identification number, the legal description from the last recorded deed, and every record owner name rather than only the one on the agreement. Where the owner is an entity, include prior entity names, since a lien recorded against a former name is indexed under that former name.
Then set the term to the question. A refinance is asking about the current owner. A question about coal, support rights, or an old restriction needs a term long enough to reach the instrument that created it. Our guide to Cuyahoga County title searches covers a comparable older industrial county where the offices are organized differently again.
AFX Research has searched Allegheny and every other Pennsylvania county since 1995, including in-person retrieval where an older instrument is not available as an online image.