Property ownership records are public. Every parcel in America has an owner, and that owner’s name and mailing address sit in a county database that anyone can inspect. So building a national mailing-address dataset should be simple.
It isn’t — and the reason has almost nothing to do with availability.
We spent a research cycle surveying bulk property data across all fifty states and the largest US counties, with one specific question: which sources include owner name and mailing address, and which of those can legally be redistributed to third parties?
The answer reshaped how we think about data sourcing.
Availability is not the constraint. Licensing is.
If you’re a Realtor, you already have access to excellent property data. RPR covers 160+ million parcels and it’s included in your NAR dues. CRS Data comes free with most MLS subscriptions. Both are superb tools.
Neither can be redistributed. RPR’s terms grant a non-transferable licence for your own marketing and transactions, explicitly exclude creating lists in bulk, and cap mailing-label export at 2,000 properties per month — a limit inherited from RPR’s own upstream licence. The product’s stated promise to participating MLSs is that no third party gets access. Load that data into a platform other people query and you’re the one who breached it.
The same pattern holds for skip-tracing platforms. Their licences are non-transferable, prohibit redistribution, and flow FCRA and similar obligations down to anyone you share with.
“Statewide parcel data” often means geometry with no owner
The second trap is subtler. Many states publish a statewide parcel layer, and it’s easy to assume that means owner records.
Utah’s statewide layer carries a generalized owner type — federal, private, state, tribal — because the enabling legislation deliberately excluded the attributes counties sell. Oregon’s ORMAP is a cadastral base map; owner data stays at the county. Both are real statewide programs. Neither gives you a mailing address.
Owner mailing address is the gating attribute, and it has to be verified in the schema, not inferred from the program’s existence.
Where the free data actually is
About a dozen states publish genuinely complete, redistributable owner data:
Florida’s Department of Revenue publishes NAL and NAP files covering all 67 counties as clean CSV, with owner name, mailing address, and records of exempt owners already removed. North Carolina’s OneMap aggregates all 100 counties with weekly refresh. Wisconsin’s statewide geodatabase carries owner name and postal mailing address. Montana’s Cadastral updates monthly. Maryland’s parcel points explicitly permit free distribution with attribution. Massachusetts standardizes all 351 municipalities.
At the county level, Cook County publishes roughly 1.8 million parcels with owner, taxpayer and mailing address at about 99% coverage. New York City’s PLUTO gives you owner names across the five boroughs.
Those eight sources alone cover a large share of the US population, free, with clear redistribution rights.
Where the restrictions bite
Washington bars agencies from providing lists of individuals for commercial purposes — King County requires a signed declaration before releasing data. California treats assessor records as not-public except for specified parties, which is why most California counties omit owner names online. Colorado restricts using record names and addresses to solicit business.
Separately, roughly eleven states are non-disclosure for sale prices. This is widely misunderstood: non-disclosure affects comps and valuations, not owner identity. Owner names and mailing addresses remain public in Texas, Montana, Idaho and the rest — it’s tax-roll data, not transaction data.
Scraping versus downloading
Worth stating plainly, because the distinction is where the risk lives. Downloading a published bulk file is authorized distribution under that file’s terms. Scraping a county search interface is different — after Van Buren and hiQ, the CFAA likely doesn’t reach public pages with no login, but courts preserved breach-of-contract, trespass to chattels and misappropriation claims. Terms of use that prohibit “systematic retrieval” mean what they say.
Prefer the published file. It’s usually better structured anyway.
The practical conclusion
For anyone building on property data, the sequence that works:
Start with the free statewide programs that include owner mailing address — Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Montana, Maryland, Massachusetts — plus Cook County and NYC. Free, redistributable, clean schemas, and enough volume to prove a pipeline.
Then fill the gaps with a commercial provider whose licence actually permits third-party display. Most don’t by default. Standard API terms from the major vendors grant internal use only; redistribution requires a negotiated rider.
And keep restricted sources restricted. Your MLS-derived data is for your own work. That’s not a limitation to route around — it’s the deal that makes the data exist.
How we research data at Deal Match
This survey wasn’t academic. It’s how we decide what goes into the platform.
Every dataset we ship goes through the same process. We start from the primary source — the agency that actually publishes the record, not an aggregator sitting on top of it. We read the schema before we trust a description, because “parcel data” and “parcel data with owner mailing address” are different products. We read the licence before we write a loader, because a dataset we can’t redistribute is a dataset we can’t build on. And we record provenance per field, so every record in Deal Match can tell you where it came from and when.
That discipline is why our SEC datasets load from the Commission’s own bulk files rather than a scraper, why every result row carries a source badge, and why we’d rather ship eight states with clean rights than fifty with a legal question mark.
It’s slower. It’s also the only way to build a data product you can actually sell.
The full survey
Statewide programs with download URLs and licence terms, county-by-county breakdown, the non-disclosure state list, commercial vendor comparison, and a ranked top-ten with a phased ingestion plan:
Deal Match AI is a counterparty database for people who need to reach investors, allocators and decision-makers directly. Verified records, source provenance on every row.
Disclaimer: This article summarises publicly available information about data licensing and public-records law. It is not legal advice. Licensing terms, state statutes and agency policies change, and their application depends on your specific circumstances. Consult qualified counsel before redistributing property data or building a commercial product on public records. The author is a licensed REALTOR® and a member of the National Association of REALTORS®.
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