"0" property addresses and finding the status of empty lots

[Leighann Davis]

Hello all,

To give you a little context for my question: I'm currently looking for my first deal that I hope to be a buy and hold rental. There's a certain area that I'm really interested in so I've been trying to look into a lot of information on the area and on the houses. One thing I wanted to do is see if there were other people/companies in the area that own a handful of properties that indicate that there are other investors in the area (not that that would make or break my decision in any way... just curious about the environment and maybe people I need to get to know). 

So basically I typed in the street names for the neighborhood I'm looking at, and copied all the info into an excel spreadsheet (Address, Parcel ID, Owner Name, Last Sale). I did some conditional formatting to show if there were any duplicate names (indicating that that person may own more than one property). 

That worked.....

But what I also found was certain addresses with '0' as the address number... with multiple parcel IDs and multiple owners. So for example the one I'm looking at now is like 0 ABC Street. Is shows that there are 19 different parcel IDs for this 0 ABC Street, 9 of which are owned by the same person and the rest are owned by other people. How does that work? I assume this is a piece of land that was parceled off (is that a term?) and sold and is now owned by several individuals... and because it hasn't been developed or built on yet they haven't been assigned addresses. However, more knowledable insight would be great. 

As a follow up question, is there a way to find out whether those are in the process of being developed or just sitting there (aside from contacting the owners of the property directly)??? I searched through a county permit website with a couple of the parcel IDs and there were no results. So I assume they're just sitting on those lots?

Thanks!

Leighann