Parcel Index

Parcel Index

(This is patterned after the Harper Index™ published each month in Harpers magazine)

There are approximately 12,000 real estate assessing jurisdictions in the US.

This is about 26,000 people and about 13,000 parcels per assessing jurisdiction.

In Michigan there are approximately 5,000 people and about 2,500 parcels per assessing jurisdiction.

Virginia has 138 real estate taxing jurisdictions.

There are over 6,000 real estate taxing jurisdictions in the US.

There are approximately 150,000,000 tax parcels in the US and approximately 313,000,000 people, averaging about 2 people per parcel.

Slightly over 90% of the tax parcels in the US have been mapped in a computer mapping system.

About 94% of the US lives in a jurisdiction that has digital parcel data.

Approximately 75% of the counties in the US have digital parcel mapping systems.

Approximately 50 apps related to parcel data are in the iTunes store, not all of them US based.

The Public Land Survey System (PLSS) covers 30 states in the US.

Manta lists 181,848 companies with land surveying in their name, 242, 658 with Land Information in their name, and 67,045 with Geographic Information in their name in the US. 

RealtyTrac estimates there were 130,888 new foreclosures in July 2013 with an average sale value of $164,971.

RealtyTrac estimates that there are currently 1,305,081 properties in US that are in some stage of foreclosure (default, auction, or bank owned).

According to the Census there were 132,419,000 housing units in the US in 2011. Approximately 114,907,000 were occupied as regular residences and 17,512,000 were vacant or seasonal.

The assessment jurisdiction numbers come from the International Association of Assessing Officers (http://www.iaao.org), the parcel counts come from the national parcel inventory (http://www.bhgis.org/inventory/) data set, Manta can be found at (http://www.manta.com/), RealtyTrac can be found at (http://www.realtytrac.com/), and the US Census Bureau is at (http://www.census.gov/).  Harper's Index can be found at (http://harpers.org/harpers-index/)