The purchase or sale of a property feels, while it is happening, like a private transaction. It is conducted between a small number of parties, advised by professionals, and discussed with discretion. But a property transaction is also a recorded event, and in many jurisdictions what is recorded includes the price.

Once recorded, a transaction price is a remarkably durable fact. It does not fade as memory fades. It sits in the record, attached to the property and dated, and it can be consulted years afterwards by anyone who looks. A sum that was negotiated in private becomes, on completion, a permanent line in a public account.

The price is informative out of proportion to its single figure. It indicates what a person was able and willing to pay at a particular moment. Set against the prices of other properties associated with the same person, it begins to suggest a scale of means. Set against the dates of other events, it places that scale in time. A price is never only a price; it is a data point in an account of a person's circumstances.

It is also a fact that travels. Property prices are not merely held in official registers; they are collected, published, and discussed by a range of services that make a business of property information. A transaction recorded once is liable to be repeated in many places, and a fact that exists in many places is, for practical purposes, permanent and beyond recall.

Holding property through a company changes whose name appears against the price, but it does not conceal the price itself, nor does it sever the price from the property. The transaction is still recorded; the figure is still legible. What a structure can do is add a step between the price and the person. What it cannot do is make the price private after the fact.

The sensible response is not to be troubled by this, since property must be bought and sold, but to account for it. A person should know what their own transactions have recorded, understand that those records are durable and widely repeated, and weigh that knowledge into how their property is held and how it is discussed. A price, once it has been recorded, is one of the steadiest facts there is, and steady facts are exactly the ones that deserve to be understood early.