Arizona Mechanics Lien & Lis Pendens Feed

Construction Distress Feed is an Apify Actor by Sullivan Ventures that collects every new mechanics lien and lis pendens recorded with the Maricopa County Recorder (Phoenix, Arizona) each week and groups the records by company, flagging repeat filers and companies new to the feed. It's built for collections firms, credit managers, sureties and construction attorneys.

Each week, get every new mechanics lien and lis pendens recorded in Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix metro). You can also pull trustee sale notices, judgments and state/federal tax liens. Every record is grouped by company, and the feed flags the contractors and suppliers whose claims are stacking up.

Run it on a schedule (weekly is ideal). Each run remembers what it saw before, so you can tell which companies are new this week and which keep showing up.

Who it's for

• Collections firms and credit managers. See which contractors and suppliers are filing liens (they're owed money) and which owners and GCs keep getting liened (they're slow payers).
• Sureties and bond agents. A general contractor with liens piling up across several jobs is a warning sign for a bond claim.
• Construction attorneys. Lien claimants have a deadline to enforce their liens, and lis pendens filed by subcontractors usually mean lien-foreclosure suits. Fresh records reach you before the dispute hardens.
• Data resellers and lead platforms. You get a clean, deduplicated, scheduled JSON or CSV feed straight from the official recorder, with no captcha and no proxy needed.

What you get

Dataset (one row per recorded document):

• recording_number, recording_date, doc_type, document_code, page_count
• business_parties: the companies named on the document
• contractor_supplier_parties
• repeat_company_names, has_repeat_company
• has_new_company: a company never seen in your prior runs
• is_new_record
• source_url: the official recorder API record, so you can check it yourself

Key-value store outputs:

• COMPANIES (JSON) and COMPANIES_CSV, one row per normalized company:
  • record_count and counts_by_type for the window
  • repeat_company, repeat_in_window
  • status_vs_prior_run (new, repeat, or baseline on the first run)
  • first_seen, prior_total_records
  • entity_hint (contractor_supplier, hoa_association, debt_buyer_collector, lender_trustee_gov, other_business)
  • name_variants
• SUMMARY: counts, the top repeat companies, and serial filers that were not flagged

Company names are normalized. "RK ELECTRICAL" and "RK ELECTRICAL LLC" become one company.

Serial filers aren't flagged as repeats by default. HOAs, debt buyers, lenders, trustees and government agencies file on many records as routine business. They still appear in the output, just without the flag. You can change this with repeatExcludeHints.

Inputs

Field	Default	Notes
lastNDays	7	Window ends yesterday. Used when startDate is empty.
startDate / endDate	—	YYYY-MM-DD, recording date, inclusive.
docTypes	mechanics liens, modified mechanics liens, lis pendens	Also: lien releases, trustee sale notices, judgments, state and federal tax liens, performance bonds, notices of completion.
businessOnly	true	Keeps only records with a business party and leaves private individuals' names out of the output (they're counted, not listed).
repeatThreshold	2	Number of records in the window that makes a company a repeat company.
stateStoreName	construction-distress-state	Named key-value store that holds your history. Use a different name per client or market.
updateState	true	Turn off for one-off backfills.
maxRecords	2000	Safety cap.
requestDelayMs	300	Polite rate limit, one request at a time.

Example (Oct 1–7, 2026, default settings)

• 42 mechanics liens and 51 lis pendens came in. 86 had a business party.
• 162 companies were found, and 11 were flagged as repeats.
• Example repeats: a general contractor named on 5 liens in one week, and a plumbing supplier on 4.

Sample output (one record)

{
  "recording_number": "20260573203",
  "recording_date": "2026-10-01",
  "doc_type": "mechanics_lien",
  "document_code": "MECH LN",
  "business_parties": ["CALPORTLAND", "CARNERO CONTRACTING LLC", "DIOCESAN COUNCIL FOR THE SOCIETY OF SAINT VINCENT DE"],
  "individual_party_count": 0,
  "repeat_company_names": ["CALPORTLAND", "CARNERO CONTRACTING LLC"],
  "has_repeat_company": true,
  "contractor_supplier_parties": ["CALPORTLAND", "CARNERO CONTRACTING LLC"],
  "is_new_record": true,
  "page_count": 8,
  "source_url": "https://publicapi.recorder.maricopa.gov/documents/20260573203"
}

Companies CSV (key-value store COMPANIES_CSV):

company_name,record_count,counts_by_type,repeat_company,entity_hint
CARNERO CONTRACTING LLC,5,mechanics_lien:5,true,contractor_supplier
REECE PLUMBING,4,mechanics_lien:4,true,contractor_supplier

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.04 per record (one dataset row = one recorded document). No start fee. The company list (COMPANIES / COMPANIES_CSV) and SUMMARY are included free.

• A typical week in Maricopa County (mechanics liens + lis pendens, businesses only) is about 80 to 100 records, so roughly $3 to $4 per week.
• Set a maximum cost per run in the run options to cap spend. The feed then outputs only as many records as fit, repeat-company records first.
• Plus standard Apify platform usage, which is tiny (a weekly run takes under a minute at 256 MB).

Data limits (read before buying)

• No lien amounts, property addresses or parcel numbers yet. The recorder's public index only lists names, dates, document type and page count. Those other details are printed on the recorded document image.
• Party roles aren't given. The index lists every name on the document without saying who is the claimant and who is the owner. entity_hint helps tell contractors and suppliers apart from owners, lenders and HOAs.
• The business and individual split uses rules. Some edge cases will be wrong, such as a person's name with no company words or a company name with no suffix.
• Coverage is Maricopa County, AZ only for now. Records post to the index with a lag of about 1 to 2 days.
• The source is the Maricopa County Recorder's public API. If its format changes, the run fails with a clear "SCHEMA CHANGE DETECTED" error instead of quietly returning bad data.

FAQ

How do I find mechanics liens filed in Maricopa County?

Run this Actor weekly. It reads the Maricopa County Recorder's public index and returns each new mechanics lien and lis pendens with the recording date, document number and named businesses. In the Oct 1-7, 2026 test week that was 42 mechanics liens and 51 lis pendens.

Which contractors have multiple liens against them?

The feed groups records by company and flags repeat names. In the Oct 1-7, 2026 test it found 162 companies and flagged 11 as repeats, including a general contractor named on 5 liens in one week. That's an early warning sign for sureties and credit managers.

What does a lis pendens mean in construction?

A lis pendens is a public notice that a lawsuit affects a property. In construction, subcontractors often file one when they sue to foreclose a mechanics lien, so a fresh lis pendens usually means a payment dispute has gone to court.

How much does it cost?

$0.04 per record plus Apify platform usage. A typical Maricopa County week (mechanics liens and lis pendens, businesses only) is about 80 to 100 records, so roughly $3 to $4 a week. The company list and summary are included free.

Does it cover other counties or states?

Today it covers Maricopa County, Arizona (Phoenix metro) only. Other US county recorders publish lien indexes in different ways, and we add them on request when the records are public and allowed for reuse. Coverage: we confirm data availability for your county before you run it; ask in the Issues tab.

Responsible use

These are public records. If you're a lawyer using them for outreach, your state's advertising and solicitation rules apply (for example, Arizona ER 7.3 and Nevada RPC 7.3). Don't use this data for tenant, employment or credit screening (FCRA).