Real Estate Sale Advertisements

Real Estate Sale Advertisements 

Real estate sale advertisements are a record type that has gained more attention during the Internet era.  They were published by newspapers—even in the very beginnings of newspapers in the colonial period.  

For New Jersey buildings, for example, sale notices began to appear in significant numbers in New York City and Philadelphia newspapers about 1740.  A study that I conducted that examined the years 1741 through 1775 concluded that more than five thousand sale notices appeared for New Jersey properties alone (New Jersey did not yet have any newspapers of its own), and those notices specifically enumerated about fifteen thousand buildings.  Useful descriptive information was provided for perhaps one-fourth of the buildings.

The number of newspapers exploded after the Revolutionary War, and most (maybe all) of them published sale notices, a very popular and necessary form of advertising.  The number of notices published in the decades following that war would have grown geometrically with each generation.  Thus their value as descriptive documents, even through the 19th century, should not be discounted.  

They are most easily found today online through digital newspaper databases. (eg. Newspapers.com)