Mortgages vs. Gifts vs. Sales in DLD Data: Don't Mix Them Up
Why the DLD search form has a "Transaction Type" filter
If you've pulled data from DLD's open real estate data portal, you've seen the "Transaction Type" dropdown before running a search: All, Sales, Mortgages, Gifts. It's easy to skip past this filter and just search "All" to get the biggest dataset. That's the mistake that quietly corrupts price research.
DLD records every change of ownership or interest in a property as a transaction, but not every transaction is a sale. The three types on offer represent fundamentally different events:
- Sales — an actual purchase, money changing hands for the property itself.
- Mortgages — registration of a property as loan collateral. No ownership sale is necessarily happening; a bank's charge against the property is being recorded.
- Gifts — a transfer of ownership without a market sale, commonly between family members (parent to child, between spouses, etc.).
All three get logged with a transaction amount and appear in the dataset. That's the part that catches people out.
Why a "Gift" transaction amount isn't a market price
A Gift transaction still carries a value field in DLD's records. But a value entered against a gift transfer isn't evidence of what a buyer paid a seller in an arm's-length deal — it may reflect a nominal or administrative figure tied to the transfer, not negotiated market value. If you're building an average price per square foot for a building or area and you don't filter out Gifts, you're blending family transfers into what should be a pure sales comparison. The average will bend toward whatever those non-market figures happen to be, and you won't know it happened unless you checked the transaction type field.
Why a "Mortgage" transaction isn't a sale either
A Mortgage entry in the DLD data reflects the registration of a property as security for a loan — the bank's interest being recorded, not a purchase price. Mortgages can also be registered when a property is refinanced, without any change of buyer at all. Counting a mortgage record as a "sale" for price research doesn't just introduce noise — it can double-count a property that already appears once under its actual sale transaction, and it can attach numbers to a property that don't represent what anyone paid to own it.
The practical fix when you're researching prices
- Always set the Transaction Type filter to "Sales" before pulling comparable price data — don't default to "All."
- If you're downloading the CSV for offline analysis, check the "Transaction sub type" and "Transaction Type" columns before running any averages.
- Treat Gift and Mortgage rows as separate research questions (family transfer patterns, financing activity) — not as inputs into what a property is worth on the open market.
- Cross-check whatever price range you land on using multiple sale transactions in the same building or area, not a single data point.
This matters beyond a spreadsheet exercise. If you're using historical sale prices to sanity-check what you're about to pay, gift and mortgage entries can make an area look cheaper or more expensive than it actually trades for. That distorts your negotiating position and your sense of a fair price before you even get to viewing the property in person.
Where this fits into your actual budget
None of this changes what it costs you to complete a real purchase. Whatever price you land on from clean sales data, budget for the full transaction cost stack, not just the sticker price:
| Cost item | Typical range |
|---|---|
| DLD transfer fee | ~4% of price |
| Agency/broker commission (resale) | ~2% |
| Trustee registration fee | Fixed fee, varies by registration office |
| Mortgage registration fee (if financing) | Applies on top of the above |
| Bank valuation fee (if financing) | Applies on top of the above |
Use Keyva's ROI calculator or mortgage calculator to model these against a price you've actually verified as a sale, and check listed prices against recent transactions on properties or by area on areas before assuming any number is a fair comparison.
Source: DLD Open Data — Real Estate Data
This article is informational, not legal or financial advice. DLD's own portal and search filters are the authoritative source — when in doubt, run the search yourself with Transaction Type set to Sales.