Vacant Property Lists

[Justus Patterson]

I wanted to see if anyone knows the best place to find a list of vacant properties in your own towns that are free to get. Instead of paying for them.

[Samantha Miller]

This is a bit of an indirect method, but I was able to download property lists from opendataphilly.com for free which contain all public data for about 500,000 properties in the Philadelphia county. It doesn’t specifically tell me if a property is vacant - but with a few filters I can pare it down to a small list of LIKELY vacant properties (ex. Coded as either poor or sealed/structurally compromised condition, owned for 30+ years, tax delinquent, mailing address different from property address.) By applying these filters (just using excel on the .csv file download from the site) I end up with a list of properties that are probably/likely to be vacant or at least very distressed.