In 2010, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charted new territory in an effort to develop a national database of standardized parcel-level (property) data collected directly from the most authoritative sources: local counties. HUD contracted with Abt Associates Inc. and their subcontractors, Fairview Industries and Smart Data Strategies, to embark on an exploratory project for assembling local assessor data, including key attributes such as property address, assessed value, land use, sales price, and sales history, for 127 targeted counties. The primary tasks of the project included identifying the appropriate data sources in each community, assembling the data and metadata, and standardizing the data in a common format to be accessible for HUD research efforts and for possibly aggregating data to higher levels of geography for public dissemination.

Complete documentation on the data, standardized across jurisdictions, is available for download here. The datasets are available from the HUD library. Users should be aware that parcel information is subject to frequent change, that the data in this case are from 2010 and 2011, and that the total size of the dataset for all 127 jurisdictions exceeds 60 gigabytes. Users interested in the data should email Library@hud.gov with ‘County Data Records Project’ on the subject line.

Click here for the Feasibility of Developing a National Parcel County data.