A brief summary of the parcel data found in Transect and frequently asked questions.
Transect maintains a license to nationwide parcel data from Regrid. The data includes 144 million parcel boundaries and records covering 95% of America, plus associated parcel data like owner name, address, and more. To learn more about where parcel coverage is available, view Regrid's Parcel Coverage Map.
Parcels boundaries and/or parcel attributes are not available in all counties. Parcel data comes directly from Regrid; Transect is not responsible for parcel data completeness.
Access Parcel Data
You can access parcel data in either a report or the map.
In Reports
Parcel data is available under Setting > Parcels.
In the Map
In the map, parcel data can be accessed in the Map Layers widget. You can filter by size or owner name and change the opacity of the layer. The map labels, which includes owner name and acreage, cannot be changed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does the county data come from?
Some counties are missing from the dataset but are labeled as “Available”, what does that mean?
When was the data last updated?
What do the attributes in the data mean?
Why do the parcel value fields (‘parval’) not look the way I expect?
Why do the parcel numbers (apn, pin, etc) not look the way I expect?
Do you have a specific attribute for a specific County?
What if the data looks incorrect?
Do you have land use codes?
Why are some parcels duplicated or stacked ?
Where does the County data come from?
Regrid sources data directly from each county or whom they designate as the official source for their parcel data.
Some counties are missing from the dataset but are labeled as “Available”, what does that mean?
Available county data means that Regrid has confirmed the data is available from the County, but for some reason they did not obtain the data. The usual reason is cost from the County, some Counties price their parcel data very high.
When was the data last updated?
On average 94% of the parcels have been refreshed in the last 12 months, with most of those in the last 6 months. The updates are on a rolling update schedule, refreshing county data directly for 100 - 300 counties per month, usually grouped by state.
What do the attributes in the data mean?
Regrid cleans and converts all county parcel data into a common schema. Please see the link below for a definition of each parcel attribute:
Why do the parcel value fields (‘parval’) not look the way I expect?
The parcel value related fields are all directly from the County Assessor’s data. They are populated as directly from the Assessor attributes as possible for the ‘improvements value’ (improvval), ‘land value’ (landval), ‘parcel value’ (parval), ‘ag value’ (agval) and ‘parcel valuation method’ (parvaltype) attributes. However, while those are the most common value related attributes, every County has their own definition for those attributes and their own methods for how they calculate, record and display amounts for tax purposes. We can not answer questions about why the County records the values in those attributes. We suggest visiting the County’s website or calling the Assessor’s office directly to better understand those values. If, after contacting the County it appears there is an error in what values are in those attribute fields, please send an email to help@landgrid.com.
Why do the parcel numbers (apn, pin, etc) not look the way I expect?
County Assessor parcel identification numbers (‘parcelnumb’) are well known for being complicated and often have variable punctuation or zeros (0) that can affect searching or matching by parcel id number. Counties do occasionally change their method for generating or assigning parcel numbers and that can lead to “new” and “old” parcel number situations. Regrid always retains any identification number attributes as ‘County Custom Columns’ so it should be possible to match up the data with County data directly, even if the parcel number field is not the only identification number used by the County.
Also, sometimes a State GIS source will add their own unique id to a local parcel id number.
We suggest visiting the County’s website or calling the Assessor’s office directly to better understand their parcel numbering system. If, after contacting the County it appears there is an error in what values are in the parcel id attribute field, please send an email to help@regrid.com.
Do you have a specific attribute for a specific County?
A current, detailed list of every County in Regrid's data set and what data fields are available for each county is always available at this URL.
What if the data looks incorrect?
Transect provides to our customers the parcel data exactly as we receive it from Regrid. We are happy to try to help you interpret the data, but we cannot always successfully troubleshoot errors that you find as the data is directly sourced from a third party.
More more FAQs, please visit Regrid's website here.
Do you have land use codes?
Yes, Transect provides land use codes, where available, through our parcel data. You can find them under Settings > Parcels, then scroll to the column titled Land Use. The standardized land use code keys can be found here.
Why are some parcels duplicated or stacked parcels?
Our parcel providers data is directly from county GIS and county assessor’s offices around the US. They are primarily focused on collecting taxes so recording ownership and mailing addresses is their main goal. They often use their software in creative ways to get things recorded so they can track the taxes. For parcels with multiple, individual owners the counties often ‘stack’ parcels so they can enter different owner and contact information for each owner. The 3 most common ways are:
Identical polygons stacked, exactly the same size parcel, just 4 or 10 or 100 stacked, all exactly on top of each other, with different attributes for the different owners. By far this is the most common way and is widespread around the US.
Puzzle pieces, ground parcels with exact cutouts for the footprint of the building. This is common for downtown buildings. They have no intentional overlap.
Laying condo parcels on top of a ground parcel. This is a polygon the exact size of the building, but instead of ‘cut out’ of the ground parcels, it just lays on top of the ground parcel, like a stacked solution, but only 2 layers: one big ground parcel, with smaller parcels stacked on the ground parcel, but spread out.
In these cases, our dataset usually does contain all of the addresses associated with the parcel, as each owner’s ‘parcel’ usually has what is considered a primary address.
The vast majority of the counties create unique parcel numbers for each stacked parcel. The unique parcel number is a benefit of the stacked parcel approcach. However, some counties will duplicate the parcel number and use a secondary id field for the sub-parcels. We think this is much more rare, and we would retain any secondary parcel numbers as a custom column in our data.
For more info from our parcel provider see their in-depth help article on parcel data.