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The Real Estate Record: About the Collection

The Real Estate Record is a weekly report of building activity in New York City and its environs. This website contains fully digitized volumes, ranging from Volume 1 (published in 1868) to Volume 110 (published in 1922).

Features | Other sources of online/digital copies | For more information

Features

Searching

Each volume of the Real Estate Record is searchable using keywords, or expandable through limits and Boolean operators for more powerful queries. The digitized material has been analyzed to allow searches by section (such as sales, new buildings, or foreclosures) as well. Keyword searching is possible because of optical character recognition scanning (see below).
Learn more about searching »

Browsing by Volume

Lists of volumes are available for browsing. You can navigate through the browse lists by clicking the plus [+] icon next to each volume to see its associated issues, or click on the volume link itself to jump to the home page for the volume. Each volume home page provides a link to its library catalog record, citation, full PDF download, and issue list.
Begin browsing the collection »

Reading the Real Estate Record Online

Once you have found an item via searching or browsing, you will come to the digitized item itself. You can read the item on the screen using the "previous" and "next" arrows, or download the PDF for the individual issue. A printer-friendly page and direct links to citation formats are also available. The plain-text (OCR) rendering of each page is listed on the item's screen; clicking on "view plain text" will show this information while clicking on "view page image" will bring you back to the document image itself. Finally, navigation is available to see the issue list for a given volume, return to search results or advance to a previous or next result (if applicable), or browse all volumes.
View a sample document »

About OCR text

Please note that the accuracy of full text search results may vary. Full text searching is enabled through the OCR (optical character recognition) process. The results of this process depend on the characteristics of the original documents, for example the font and paper quality.

Other sources of online/digitial copies

The Internet Archive has digitized many of Columbia University Libraries' holdings of The Real Estate Record. Its interface contains many useful features, such as highlighted search terms, that may be helpful to students of this text.
View the Internet Archive's records » (opens new window)

For More Information

Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library contains the physical copies of The Real Estate Record. At Avery, librarians that specialize in architecture, real estate, urban planning, and the built environment can help answer your questions. For questions about the Real Estate Record, to visit the physical collection, or to send feedback, contact the Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library.