Properties of chemical substances drive a large portion of research in the sciences, but properties are very difficult to search in full text documents, and while searches in chemical information retrieval resources may help, the effective use of such resources may require considerable knowledge of the indexing and excerption policies in the databases being searched. Major sources of property information are PubChem, Reaxys, and SciFinder/SciFinder[superscript n], and in this article we summarize the content and discoverability of information on properties in substance records in these products and suggest issues that need to be addressed in chemical information retrieval teaching programs.