Who Owns Atlanta?

FAQ

Why doesn't my address show up in search?

Search covers addresses in the City of Atlanta, Fulton County and DeKalb County. If searching older variants, spelling variations that may not be updated or the such fails, try browsing the map. Clayton, Gwinnett, Cobb, and other metro counties are not included.

What can't I search by X?

In the attempt to both maintain a shoe-string budget and keep this site online, most of it is statically generated to reserve resources for the portions that require live data manipulations (database queries).

Why aren't more metro counties included?

Money. An original goal was replicating the work in the Horizontal Holdings paper. While Fulton, Delkalb, and Gwinnett provide Tax Parcel data for free, Cobb belives the data should cost $22k and Clayton charges $0.10-per-parcel which is also likely a "You could've bought a car!" number.

The owner shown is wrong or out of date. What gives?

Parcel records come from county tax assessor data, which lags behind actual deed transfers — sometimes by months. If a property recently sold, the new owner may not appear yet. The data reflects the most recent county extract we've processed; see our data sources for more details.

What does the CORPORATE flag mean?

The owner name matches patterns associated with a business entity — LLC, LP, Inc., Corp., Trust, Holdings, and similar. It does not mean the owner is a large or predatory landlord; many small local landlords also hold property through LLCs. What it does mean is that they are likely not your grandma creating generational wealth (ie, an individual holding property in their own name).

What does the INSTITUTIONAL flag mean?

The owner appears to be a government body, university, hospital, religious organization, homeowners association, or similar non-profit entity. Some of these are large landholders (Atlanta Public Schools, Emory University, the City of Atlanta) that show up prominently on the leaderboard.

Why are multiple LLCs grouped together on an owner profile?

Many property investors hold land through dozens of separately-named entities. When those entities share a mailing address, a registered agent, or other identifiers, they're grouped into a cluster so you can see the full portfolio. See the Methodology page for details on how clustering works and its limitations.

I found a clustering error — two unrelated owners are grouped together.

Clustering is imperfect and we know some errors exist (see the Methodology page). If you find a specific case, feel free to report it. Include the cluster ID and the names you believe are incorrectly linked. Note: this would help refine the methodology for future runs - do not expect to see changes

A link to an owner points somewhere else or the numbers changed! What gives?

If new data is released, while an effort is made to ensure owner cluster numbers don't change, they may. Thus links will as well. Theoretically this also means previously bad matches have been corrected.

Can I download the data?

Not at this time. Everything is built on publicly avaiable data listed in the data sources. The intent is to release the code so anyone can replicate and refine the process or even adapt it for their region.

Can I download the code?

Yes. The full pipeline and web application are open source (AGPL) on GitHub. The pipeline is designed to be county-agnostic from the normalization step onward; if your county publishes tax parcel GIS data, you can adapt it. If you replicate this for another city, we'd love to hear about it.

Where does the data come from?

All data in Who Owns Atlanta? is drawn from public records. The table below lists each source, what it provides, and when we last ingested it.

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