Real Estate Land Records (2024)

Table of Contents
Aerial Photography Affordable Housing Production ARCHIVED: Planning Analysis Sections Bike Network Boost Your Business Program Building Demolitions Building Footprints Business Security Camera Program Grants Census Blocks Certified for Rental Suitability City Facilities (Master Facilities Database) City Payments Combined Sewer Service Area Commercial Corridors of Philadelphia Craigslist All Housing (Phila. only) Department of Records Easement Department of Records Property Parcels Exterior Violation Cleanups Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Planning Parcels Historic Zoning Base Maps Homes Saved Housing Counseling Agencies Hydrology Impervious Surfaces Instore Forgivable Loan Program Inventory of African American Historic Sites Inventory of Historic Religious Properties Land Use LandCare Program Large Building Energy Benchmarking Data Licenses and Inspections Appeals of Code Violations and Permit Refusals Licenses and Inspections Building Certifications Licenses and Inspections Business Licenses Licenses and Inspections Code Violations Licenses and Inspections Districts Licenses and Inspections Property History Major Watersheds - Philadelphia Major Watersheds - Regional Mid-Century Modern Architecture Inventory Non-Thru Streets for Trucks OpenMaps PHA Housing Sites Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project Philadelphia Neighborhoods Philadelphia Properties and Assessment History Philadelphia Registered Historic Districts Philadelphia Registered Historic Properties PhilaDox - Property Documents PhilaPlace PhillyHistory.org PHLmaps PPR Building Structures PPR Playgrounds PPR Properties Real Estate Tax Balances Real Estate Transfers Redevelopment Certified Areas Storefront Improvement Program Grants Disbursed Street Centerlines Street Legal Cards Street Name Alias List Street Nodes Street Place Names Street Poles Street's Code Violation Notices Traffic Calming Devices Traffic Preventative Maintenance Districts Vacant Lot Cleanups Zillow (Phila. only) Zoning Base Districts References

Aerial Photography

Data includes aerial photography of the City of Philadelphia.

Affordable Housing Production

The Division of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) provides funding to developers to build and maintain affordable housing units throughout the city. This dataset includes all DHCD-funded housing projects completed since 1994 for which there is data.

ARCHIVED: Planning Analysis Sections

Please note that this dataset is no longer in use by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and has been replaced with the Planning Districts dataset.

The Planning Analysis Sections were the boundaries for the city’s twelve planning analysis sections with attribute labels.

Bike Network

Line data includes the network of both streets with bike lanes and streets considered bicycle-friendly. Also known as the bicycle network.

Boost Your Business Program

The City of Philadelphia is launching Boost Your Business, a fund for equitable business growth. Businesses owned by people of color face unique barriers in accessing resources and opportunities, which was only worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Boost Your Business will provide funding to help diverse entrepreneurs in Philadelphia scale their businesses.

Building Demolitions

Inventory of building demolitions occurring within the City of Philadelphia. This includes both demolitions performed by private owners/contractors and by the Department of Licenses and Inspections due to dangerous building conditions.

Updated daily.

Building Footprints

Planimetric Coverage containing the delineation of buildings or related structure outlines that represent the footprints of buildings within the City of Philadelphia.

Business Security Camera Program Grants

Information regarding the number of recipients of grant monies for the Business Security Camera Program. Used for tracking completed projects, by zip code and census tract and dollar value of reimbursement.

Census Blocks

The basic unit of aggregation published by the US Census Bureau. Population statistics published for redistricting are distributed at the block level. In an urban area, this corresponds to approximately one city block. This block map has been altered to improve accuracy and align with the City of Philadelphia’s street centerline.

Certified for Rental Suitability

Properties that have applied and been approved as suitable for renting.

City Facilities (Master Facilities Database)

An inventory of buildings and other fixed assets owned, leased, or operated by the City of Philadelphia including buildings, structures, and properties (not including surplus properties). Also known as the Master Facilities Database.

City Payments

This dataset includes checks and ACH (direct deposit) payments made by the City during the fiscal year, which runs from July 1st 2016 through June 31st 2017.

Please see full metadata to learn more detail about important notes to this data, such as:

  • This data cannot be compared with other financial and accounting reports released by the City.
  • Legal and security-sensitive data has been rolled up to the aggregate dataset.
  • This dataset does not include salary and benefits data or payments the City makes to fund the operations of the First Judicial District.
  • Vendors should use the vendor payment website, not this dataset, to track payments.

Combined Sewer Service Area

This layer is dissolved and queried from PWD’s internal sewer shed feature class named modelsheds. The polygons in this layer are catchments for sanitary, storm and/or combined sewer flows. These catchments are used in the hydraulic models. Data DevelopmentBase Modelsheds are maintained regularly and delineate waste water and stormwater and combined sewer catchments in Philadelphia. Storm water and waste water pipe flow are analyzed to delineate the shed boundaries.

Commercial Corridors of Philadelphia

These are commercial corridors, centers, districts, and projects that provide consumer-oriented goods and services, including retail, food and beverage, and personal, professional, and business services.

Craigslist All Housing (Phila. only)

An RSS feed of all housing classifieds offered on the Philadelphia Craigslist site. The structured data for each listing includes a Resource Description Framework (RDF) for that listing.

Department of Records Easement

Polygon description of use rights for ingress/egress, driveways, alleyways, utilities, drainage and subsurface areas.

Department of Records Property Parcels

Department of Records (DOR) Boundaries of real estate property parcels derived from legal recorded deed documents.

Exterior Violation Cleanups

Dates and locations of when lots were cleaned (removing weeds, debris, etc.) through the City of Philadelphia’s Community Life Improvement Program.

Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Planning Parcels

PWD Parcels with fields added that help categorize parcels by Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Planning program and standardize ownership or ownership category and summarize impervious cover by surface type.

Historic Zoning Base Maps

The City of Philadelphia made a major revision of the zoning code and base maps in 2012. These shapefiles provide a few historic versions of zoning data up to the time of the zoning code change.

Homes Saved

To prevent homeowners from becoming homeless due to foreclosure, the City initiated the Residential Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention Program, an innovative program that links a Court of Common Pleas order requiring that homeowners facing foreclosure have an opportunity to meet with their lenders to negotiate an alternative to foreclosure with City-funded housing counseling, outreach, a hotline and legal assistance. Working together, the City and the Court have created and implemented a national model.

Housing Counseling Agencies

OHCD has long supported neighborhood-based and citywide organizations offering housing counseling services to low- and moderate-income people. OHCD-funded services provided by these agencies include mortgage counseling, default and delinquency counseling, tenant support and housing consumer education. Through these services prospective homeowners can avoid predatory loans, a significant cause of foreclosure.

Hydrology

Locations of surface water features (rivers, creeks, ponds, reservoirs) and water beneath city bridges and adjacent to city borders. Separate files are available for each waterbody (and watershed) in KML form, or as a whole in Shapefile form.

Impervious Surfaces

This is one of the planimetric coverages developed as part of the aerial survey project of 1996 and updated using new aerial photography collected between 25 March 2004 and 23 April 2004.

Instore Forgivable Loan Program

Contains information about the applicant, business, project, and costs. Used for tracking completed projects; including tracking amounts paid.

Inventory of African American Historic Sites

An inventory compiled by the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia containing all the known African American historic sites in Philadelphia. Data fields for each site include Site Name, Address, Neighborhood, Significance, Site Type, Date Built, and Architect. This inventory of 400+ structures includes churches, schools, businesses, homes, clubs, benevolent associations, and more.

Inventory of Historic Religious Properties

Founded as William Penn’s “Holy Experiment,” Philadelphia has a centuries-long history of fostering and constructing prominent houses of worship throughout the city. In recent decades, as congregations face declining membership and shifting neighborhood demographics, these historically- and architecturally-significant properties have often suffered from deferred maintenance, insensitive alterations, and partial or complete demolition.

Advocacy organizations like the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia and Partners for Sacred Places have focused on this issue for years, highlighting the threats to Philadelphia’s neighborhoods and communities if these structures continue to be abandoned or lost. Over the summer of 2011, in order to more fully understand and address the issue, the Preservation Alliance partnered with Philadelphia Historical Commission and Partners for Sacred Places to develop a comprehensive index of historic churches covering the entire city. Compiling, verifying, and updating data from a number of different sources, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Molly Lester assembled a database which includes every purpose-built house of worship constructed in the city before 1960.

Data elements include: current congregation, original congregation, address, year of construction, original architect and whether or not the build is on the Philadelphia or National Historic Registers.

Land Use

City of Philadelphia land use as ascribed to individual parcel boundaries or units of land. Land use is the type of activity occurring on the land such as residential, commercial or industrial. Each unit of land is assigned one of nine major classifications of land use (2-digit code), and where possible a more narrowly defined sub-classification (3-digit code). The land use feature class has been field checked and corrected for the following Planning Districts.

LandCare Program

The Philadelphia LandCare layer is an inventory of all vacant parcels that have received the “Clean and Green” stabilization treatment and are currently under maintenance contract with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, funded by the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Housing and Community Development. Every spring and fall, additional vacant parcels are stabilized and then added to the maintenance inventory the following year. The parcels in this layer are based off the PARCEL_PWD layer, supplied by the Philadelphia Water Department.

Large Building Energy Benchmarking Data

This dataset contains annual building and performance data for those properties required to report. Property data is pulled from the Office of Property Assessment. Energy and water data is self-reported by building owners using the EPA Portfolio Manager tool. This data will be updated annually.

Licenses and Inspections Appeals of Code Violations and Permit Refusals

The Department of Licenses and Inspections accepts applications for appeals of various violations, refusals, revocations, and denials to the following Boards:*Board of Building Standards *Licenses and Inspections (L&I) Review Board*Zoning Board of Adjustments

For more information, please visit http://www.phila.gov/li/Pages/Appeals.aspx

The Court Appeals datasets provides details about Appeals that went to court and what the status/results of the court proceedings are. Some Appeal numbers could have multiple appeal types, so those are provided as a dataset below as well.

The Board Decisions datasets shows the decisions made by the Appeal Boards (LIRB, ZBA, BBS).

Licenses and Inspections Building Certifications

Certain buildings in the City of Philadelphia require periodic inspections. These inspections are performed by licensed inspection companies. Buildings that contain fire sprinkler systems or hard-wired fire alarm systems must have these systems inspected annually. Buildings over 60 feet must have their façade inspected every five years. Buildings with fire escapes or private bridges must have these structures inspected every five years. Non-vacant piers must be inspected every three years. The Department of Licenses and Inspections collects certifications documenting the conditions of these structures and enforces the requirements that property owners file these certifications with the Department and repair any structural issues or system deficiencies identified during the corresponding inspection. This dataset contains records related to these building certifications.

You can find out more information about fire protection certifications and maintenance inspections.

Licenses and Inspections Business Licenses

Information regarding applications for licenses required by the City to conduct certain business activities. Licenses are required for individuals and businesses to engage in select commercial activities. For example, vendors and restaurants require a license in order to sell goods and food and trades-people, such as plumbers and contractors, require a license in order to practice their trade.

Information includes license application type, applicant, property for which the license would be issued, application date, issue date, and expiration date. Data is accurate; however, it may be misinterpreted by an unfamiliar user.

Licenses and Inspections Code Violations

Violations issued by the Department of Licenses and Inspections in reference to the Philadelphia Building Construction and Occupancy Code.

Please note that L&I Violations is a very large dataset. To see all violations, download all datasets for all years.

If you are comfortable with APIs, you can also use the API links to access this data. You can learn more about how to use the API at Carto’s SQL API site and in the Carto guide in the section on making calls to the API.

Licenses and Inspections Districts

District Boundaries for the Department of Licenses & Inspections are pre 2014.Districts Broad refers to the five districts which contain their own district offices and are a method the department uses to assign and analyze work.

Licenses and Inspections Property History

This dataset documents the history of permits, licenses, violations, and appeals for each property in the City.

Major Watersheds - Philadelphia

Polygon feature class representing major watersheds in Philadelphia. Data was developed originally from either USGS and the 2004 Sanborn DEM (digital elevation model) using ArcHydro watershed extraction tools. Major Watersheds are dissolved from subshed boundaries which reflect surface flow in relationship to stormwater inlets and outfalls.

Major Watersheds - Regional

Polygon feature class representing major watersheds in Philadelphia. Data was developed originally from either USGS and the 2004 Sanborn DEM (digital elevation model) using ArcHydro watershed extraction tools. Major Watersheds are dissolved from subshed boundaries which reflect surface flow in relationship to stormwater inlets and outfalls.

Mid-Century Modern Architecture Inventory

Mid-century modern architecture and buildings of the recent past are enjoying a resurgence of appreciation and interest nationwide, but here in Philadelphia, our eclectic collection of postwar buildings is often overlooked. To help identify and celebrate these emerging landmarks, the Preservation Alliance is compiling a list of notable structures built within the city between 1945 and 1980. The inclusion of a building in this inventory does not imply endorsement of it for designation or other purposes, nor does its absence imply a lack of significance. Rather, the list is meant to illustrate the breadth and depth of design from an era often overshadowed by earlier periods and styles.

Non-Thru Streets for Trucks

To map streets with no through trucks in the City of Philadelphia.

OpenMaps

Explore Philadelphia’s most popular open geographic data in one easy to use mapping tool. This tool was built by the City’s Office of Innovation and Technology’s CityGeo team.

PHA Housing Sites

The Philadelphia Housing Authority Housing Sites application is a map of public housing in the City of Philadelphia. The application enables users to filter results by type of development, number of bedrooms, and units with accessibility features. The information for each housing site includes the name, location, an image, and a link to a fact sheet with additional details.

Philadelphia Architects and Buildings Project

An online database of architectural and historical information and images for 35,000+ structures, 110,000 images+ images and maps and biographies of 5,000+ architects in the 5 county region around Philadelphia. Development was a collaboration between private, academic, and public entities led by the Athenæum of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia Neighborhoods

This dataset includes neighborhood boundaries for 157 neighborhoods in Philadelphia. The data was gathered from a mix of publicly available maps, including from the City of Philadelphia, the City Archives, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and user feedback.

Philadelphia Properties and Assessment History

Some of the information in the open data files below may not yet reflect the data used to calculate the most recent tax year’s property value. If you see missing or incorrect info about your property, use this form to contact OPA to report the issue.

Property characteristic and assessment history from the Office of Property Assessment for all properties in Philadelphia. See more information on how OPA assesses property and their reports on the quality of assessments.

This data updates nightly. Please ignore the ‘created by’ date below - the date of August 2015 shows when this webpage, not the data, was created.

Philadelphia Registered Historic Districts

Historic districts listed on the Philadelphia Register. Data was updated by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in August 2017. The public can confirm a property’s historic status by contacting the Historical Commission at 215-686-7660.

You can also download a dataset of the Historic sites.

Philadelphia Registered Historic Properties

Historic sites listed on the Philadelphia Register. Data was updated by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission in July 2017. The public should confirm a property’s historic status by contacting the Historical Commission at 215-686-7660.

You can also download a dataset of the Historic districts.

PhilaDox - Property Documents

PhilaDox is an online database of documents filed with the City of Philadelphia Department of Records. It stores contemporary land records, including deeds, sheriff deeds, mortgages, and land titles since 1974. Data is viewable as lists, tables and scanned images of the actual documents. The database is searchable by grantor/grantee names, address, or county record book and page. Scanned documents can be downloaded as PDFs.

Full access to PhilaDox records is available with a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual subscription. More limited search for names and address is available for free public access.

PhilaPlace

PhilaPlace is an online interactive database of both contemporary and historical multimedia record, including personal/neighborhood stories, photography, and video, of individuals and communities in the Old Southwark and Greater Northern Liberties Areas. Users can search locations (neighborhoods, streets) and set thematic parameters to learn more about events, businesses and people who were memorable to the different communities. Entries in the database are visualized as feature markers in an interactive map tool, accompanying the search. PhilaPlace was developed by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

PhillyHistory.org

PhillyHistory.org is an online database of historic photographs and maps from the Philadelphia City Archives and four additional area institutions. A project of the City of Philadelphia Department of Records, the database contains images dating back to the 1850s and can be searched by geographic criteria such as address, intersection, place name, and neighborhood as well as keyword, date, collection, topics, and other criteria. Images and maps are associated with a location using the database’s geocoding feature. Users can create a free account to save images, bookmark searches, and submit error reports.

PHLmaps

The City of Philadelphia’s ArcGIS Online organization that hosts references to open data releases as feature services and AGO map applications shared with the public. Maintained by the City’s Office of Innovation and Technology’s CityGeo team.

PPR Building Structures

Footprints of buildings and structures located on Philadelphia Parks and Recreation (PPR) properties or utilized directly by PPR.

PPR Playgrounds

Displays the locations of playgrounds within PPR Boundaries. Playgrounds ARE designated as similar age range equipment within a definable distance (not each piece of equipment).

PPR Properties

Locations and boundaries for properties that Philadelphia Parks and Recreation (PPR) has responsibility for or has a distinct role in the maintenance or management.

Real Estate Tax Balances

Data about real estate accounts with tax balances. The aggregated datasets include both accounts with overdue balances (property owner owes a late balance in the current tax year but it is not yet considered delinquent) and tax delinquencies. Tax delinquencies are accounts with outstanding balances for previous tax years. A past due account becomes delinquent when the real estate tax is still unpaid on January 1 of the following year that the tax was due.

Real Estate Transfers

The Department of Records (DOR) published data for all documents recorded since December 06, 1999, including all real estate transfers in Philadelphia. Document type, grantor, and grantee information is presented by address for each transaction. More specifically, the real estate transfers data shows the dates and location of property sales, deeds, mortgages, and sheriff deeds, and includes associated data, such as any realty transfer tax paid. This table contains both raw source data as well as calculated and geocoded/data fields.

Please note that this is a very large dataset and Excel will not load all of the records. If you’re only comfortable with Excel, please use either the links for individual years, or the data visualization which allows you to filter the dataset by your specific interests (i.e. a zip code) and then export a custom CSV from the table at the bottom of the visualization. We provide the CSV of All Years mostly for developers to use when coding.If you are comfortable with APIs, you could also use the API links to access this data. You can learn more about how to use the API at Carto’s SQL API site and in the Carto guide in the section on making calls to the API.

Redevelopment Certified Areas

Development certified areas, i.e. areas deemed blighted and eligible for urban renewal by the Philadelphia City Planning Commission under the amended Pennsylvania Urban Redevelopment Law. Blighted areas are defined as meeting one of seven city mandated criteria, including unsafe, unsanitary and inadequate conditions; economically or socially undesirable land use; and faulty street and lot layout.

Storefront Improvement Program Grants Disbursed

This data set reflects the recipients, award amounts, and project sites for grant money disbursed by the Philadelphia Commerce Department for the Storefront Improvement Program whereby businesses are provided the funds to improve the exterior of their storefront.

Street Centerlines

Used citywide as base layer for many purposes/applications. The street centerline is available for reference purposes only and does not represent exact engineering specifiactions. The Philadelphia Streets Department makes no guarantees as to the accuracy of the layer. Associated tables can be found here: https://www.opendataphilly.org/datasets/street-place-names
https://www.opendataphilly.org/datasets/street-name-alias-list

Street Legal Cards

Street Centerline Arcs with link to legal cards, which are a collection of cards containing the official record of the legal description and drawings of city streets.

Street Name Alias List

Table to display street names which have aliased street names associated with them.

Street Nodes

The street nodes layer was developed for use by agencies citywide including PWD, PCPC, Police, BRT, Health, etc.

Street Place Names

A listing of “places” and their corresponding addresses to be used for geocoding.

Street Poles

This layer was developed to aid the Street Lighting Division in planning, referencing, and maintaining the active street poles within the City of Philadelphia. Examples include: providing information regarding group replacement projects and any individual edits, using tables from layer for billing, and aiding cityworks.

Street's Code Violation Notices

A code violation notice is issued from the Street’s department when a person has violated one or more codes in the City of Philadelphia or violated one or more Streets Department rules and regulations. A code violation notice (CVN) is a penalty punishable by a fine up to $300.00.

Addresses have been generalized to the hundred-block level (ie. 1234 Market Street becomes 1200 block of Market Street). Please note that the CVN dataset does not include all CVNs. Some are issued as paper tickets. As of 2018, a reporting system upgrade is underway. Once complete, the City plans to update this information to include all CVNs.

Please note that this is a very large dataset. To see all CVNs, download all datasets for all years.

If you are comfortable with APIs, you can also use the API links to access this data. You can learn more about how to use the API at Carto’s SQL API site and in the Carto guide in the section on making calls to the API.

Traffic Calming Devices

Point-based dataset showing the approximate locations where Traffic Calming Devices exist in the street to reduce speeding of motor vehicles. Traffic Calming Devices examples are speed cushions, speed humps, and speed tables. These devices could be made of asphalt or rubber materials.

Traffic Preventative Maintenance Districts

This layer was developed to aid the Traffic Division in planning, organizing, and maintaining traffic flow within the City of Philadelphia. Examples include: the maintenance and placing of stop signs and signals and monitoring street travel direction. This polygon layer has an accompanying arc layer. Certain arcs in the arc layer contain data signifying information relating it to the polygon layer. It can tell you if both sides of the arc belong to one of the bounding polygons. All the arcs, including those with no boundary info, have naming attributes for labeling the polygon borders. Contact the Streets GIS unit for public consumption of the corresponding arc layer.

Vacant Lot Cleanups

Dates and locations of when lots were cleaned (removing weeds, debris, etc.) through the City of Philadelphia’s Community Life Improvement Program.

Zillow (Phila. only)

Searchable online database of homes for sale, rent, and not currently on the market, with value estimator, market report, and real-estate trend tool. Users search by location (neighborhood, city, zip code, address) and parameters, such as property specifications, pricing, and keyword. Registration allows for favorite listing saving, customized property e-mail alerts, and other privileges. Users can also access real-estate listing data through an API.

Zoning Base Districts

Polygon boundaries of Zoning Base Districts based on existing City zoning districts with revised codes applied per enactment of the new Zoning Code of December 2011, made effective August 22, 2012. District boundaries unchanged from previous zoning with the exception of certain CMX2 / CMX2.5 splits.

Real Estate Land Records (2024)

References

Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Mr. See Jast

Last Updated:

Views: 5935

Rating: 4.4 / 5 (75 voted)

Reviews: 82% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Mr. See Jast

Birthday: 1999-07-30

Address: 8409 Megan Mountain, New Mathew, MT 44997-8193

Phone: +5023589614038

Job: Chief Executive

Hobby: Leather crafting, Flag Football, Candle making, Flying, Poi, Gunsmithing, Swimming

Introduction: My name is Mr. See Jast, I am a open, jolly, gorgeous, courageous, inexpensive, friendly, homely person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.