A parcel dataset is only as interesting as what gets built on it. Today we’re launching www.landstats.com — a showcase of nine free interactive apps and two analytics products, every one of them computing against the same nationwide parcel layer we publish. Nothing on the site is a canned screenshot or a fixture file: the maps, rankings and dollar figures come out of the warehouse when you load the page.

Nine apps, from a phone in a field to a county-wide market study

The apps are free and public, no account required. They exist to answer a specific question rather than to be a general-purpose GIS, and each one pairs the parcel layer with whatever else it needs — wetlands, FEMA zones, Census blocks, power lines, rail.

• My Parcel — take a GPS fix on your phone and it identifies the parcel you’re standing on, then draws the boundary, acreage, owner and assessed value. The fastest way to find a lot line without a survey crew.
• Terra Firma — ranks every parcel in the current map view by elevation and puts FEMA flood-zone context next to it. Useful when “is this the high ground?” is the whole question.
• Who Owns This County — classifies every parcel in a county by the kind of owner behind it, whether that owner is local, in-state or absentee, and ranks the largest landholders.
• Landowner Search — rank a county’s owners by acreage, parcel count or assessed value, search the owner list by name, and light up every parcel behind a single holding on the map.
• Storage Atlas — rebuilds the Tampa Bay self-storage market from the parcel record: facilities, operators, site acreage and rentable square feet across four counties, measured against the population inside each three-mile trade area.
• Datacenter Siting — scores large parcels on acreage plus distance to transmission lines and substations, which is the first cut every siting team makes by hand.
• Parcels Near Rail — the same idea against FRA rail lines, crossings and yards, for industrial siting on one side and noise exposure on the other.
• Parcel CAD — select a parcel, read its bearings and distances in a drafting view, and export an R12 DXF you can open in AutoCAD.
• Turtle Release Locator — scores nearby parcels as release habitat for a displaced turtle using wetlands, open water, road crossings, shoreline and terrain. Built for a real problem: a rescued turtle needs somewhere close to home, wet, and away from traffic.

Two insights, with the numbers already on the page

The insights are the paid side — scoped analytics products that answer a question for a region rather than a parcel. Each product page carries a live sample dashboard, so you can see the real output before you order anything.

Hidden Flood Risk looks for the parcels that sit just outside the FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area — close enough to flood in a larger event, but outside the line that triggers a mandatory insurance requirement. In the downtown Nashville study area — about 53,000 parcels — 363 have their centre inside the mapped high-risk zone. Another 2,796 sit within 150 metres of it: 3,889 acres and $2.43 billion in assessed value that the flood map doesn’t flag. Roughly eight parcels just outside the line for every one inside it. Five study areas ship today — Nashville, Richmond, Virginia Beach, Charleston and Austin.

Hunting Land Valuation measures the recreational land market: rural tracts between 40 and 20,000 acres carrying at most one building. Virginia has 115,051 of them — 14.2 million acres, $90.2 billion assessed, an average tract of 123 acres and a median of $2,909 per acre. The county spread is the interesting part: the median acre runs $9,866 in Albemarle and $7,403 in Augusta, against $1,815 in Halifax and $1,588 in Brunswick. A sixfold spread between counties in the same state, visible only once you compute it county by county.

Everything computes on the live warehouse

Each app and insight queries the parcel warehouse directly through a read-only role, with results cached for six hours — long enough to keep a county rollup snappy, short enough that a quarterly parcel release shows up on its own. There is no ETL step between the dataset we sell and the numbers on that site, which is deliberate: if an app is slow or a figure looks wrong, that’s a fact about the data or our SQL, not about a stale export.

Which is why every app has a View SQL button. It opens the actual statement that produced what you’re looking at, substitutions and all — the acreage conversion from calcarea, the owner-classification CASE, the PostGIS predicate doing the spatial work. If you license the dataset, that query is a starting point you can paste into your own database.

What building nine apps taught us about the data

Writing real applications against 3,230 counties surfaces things a schema browser never will, and the apps show the seams rather than papering over them:

• Acreage comes from the geometry. taxacres carries systematic outliers in enough counties that we compute area from calcarea instead — every acre figure on landstats is derived from the parcel polygon.
• Owner type is mostly missing, so we infer it. ownertype is empty nearly everywhere, so Who Owns This County and Landowner Search classify owners from the name itself, and share one classification rule so the two apps can’t disagree about what counts as a company.
• Some years are assessment dates in disguise. Cook County files yearbuilt = 2022 on 97% of its storage parcels. Storage Atlas drops any single year that accounts for more than half of a county’s filed years, and says so on screen.
• Column coverage varies, and it’s published. bldgsqft, totalvalue and usedesc run from complete to absent depending on the county. The per-column fractions live in publish.parcel_county_coverage, and the apps surface them next to the numbers they affect.

Build the tenth one

Everything on landstats runs on the layer we publish: 157M+ parcels across 3,230 counties, harmonized into one schema. If one of these apps is close to something you need, you can build it — take the data as a bulk download, query it over WMS/WFS or the REST API, or hand it to an assistant through our parcel MCP server. Browse the showcase at www.landstats.com, and tell us what you’d build at hello@landrecords.us.