Parcel Owner Lookup — Address to Owner & Assessor Record API

Turn any US street address into a parcel ID, owner name, owner mailing address, assessed value, property class, and coordinates — straight from official government assessment rolls, with a US Census geocoder fallback. One address in, exactly one structured row out. $0.02 per lookup (pay per result).

Built as an address-grounding primitive: the boring-but-critical first step of property research, lead generation, skip tracing, and AI-agent real-estate workflows.

Who it's for

• AI agents & LLM apps — ground a free-text address to a canonical parcel + owner before doing anything else (valuation, permits, liens, outreach). Clean, described output fields make this a chainable MCP tool.
• Proptech developers — add "who owns this property?" to your product without licensing a parcel-data vendor.
• Skip tracing / real-estate lead gen — the owner_mailing_address field is the pre-step for direct-mail and owner-outreach lists.
• Title, lending & due-diligence analysts — confirm the recorded owner and parcel ID behind an address in seconds.

Coverage (v1 — more counties compound)

Area	Roll	What you get
Chicago / Cook County, IL	Cook County Assessor Parcel Universe (Socrata)	PIN, owner/taxpayer + mailing address, class, lat/lon
Philadelphia, PA	OPA property roll (Carto SQL)	OPA parcel number, owner(s), mailing address, market value, category, lat/lon
New York City (5 boroughs)	MapPLUTO (Socrata)	BBL, owner name, total assessed value, building class, lat/lon
Everywhere else	US Census geocoder	Normalized address + lat/lon (match_confidence: "geocoded", no parcel/owner)

These three rolls cover ~13M people and three of the largest US property markets. More counties are added over time — each new roll is one config block.

Example input

{
  "addresses": [
    "1060 W Addison St, Chicago, IL",
    "1234 Market St, Philadelphia, PA",
    "350 5th Ave, New York, NY"
  ],
  "maxResults": 10
}

Example output row

{
  "input_address": "1234 Market St, Philadelphia, PA",
  "matched_source": "philadelphia-opa",
  "match_confidence": "exact",
  "parcel_id": "453337700",
  "owner_name": "SEPTA",
  "owner_mailing_address": "1234 MARKET ST, PHILADELPHIA PA, 19107",
  "assessed_value": 38400000,
  "property_class": "4",
  "property_class_desc": "COMMERCIAL",
  "situs_address": "1234 MARKET ST, PHILADELPHIA, PA, 19107",
  "lat": 39.9522,
  "lon": -75.1605,
  "source_url": "https://phl.carto.com/api/v2/sql?q=..."
}

Output fields

• input_address — your address string, echoed for joining.
• matched_source — cook-county-parcel-universe | philadelphia-opa | nyc-pluto | census-geocoder | null.
• match_confidence — exact (house + street matched the roll verbatim), fuzzy (same street with a drifted suffix — e.g. Wrigley Field is "W ADDISON AVE" on the Cook roll — or nearest house number on the right street), geocoded (coordinates only), none (no match; the row is still emitted — this actor never fails on a bad address).
• parcel_id — Cook 14-digit PIN / Philadelphia OPA number / NYC 10-digit BBL.
• owner_name, owner_mailing_address — owner or taxpayer of record + mailing address (mailing is null for NYC; PLUTO doesn't publish it).
• assessed_value — NYC total assessed value; Philadelphia OPA certified market value; null for Cook County v1 (its parcel-universe roll carries no value column).
• property_class, property_class_desc — jurisdiction class code + readable description.
• situs_address, lat, lon — the roll's own address for the parcel and WGS84 coordinates.
• source_url — direct API link to the underlying official record for citation/re-fetch.

How matching works

Addresses are normalized (case, punctuation, St↔Street, Ave↔Avenue, W↔West, 5th↔5↔Fifth) and routed by city/ZIP to the right roll. The matcher then tries, in order: exact house + street; nearest house number on the same street (within 100); same house with a drifted street suffix. Anything still unmatched falls back to Census geocoding, then to an honest none row.

Use as an MCP tool

Every Apify actor is callable by AI agents via mcp.apify.com. This actor is designed for it: pass addresses, read back fully-described fields, and chain the parcel_id / lat / lon into other tools (permit lookups, flood/wildfire screeners, comparable sales). Ideal first hop of any property-research agent.

FAQ

How do I find out who owns a property by address? Run this actor with the address; it returns the owner of record and their mailing address from the official assessor roll (Chicago, Philadelphia, NYC in v1).

Is this legal / where does the data come from? All sources are public, official government open-data APIs (Cook County Socrata, Philadelphia OPA via Carto, NYC Open Data, US Census). No scraping of private sites.

What happens with an address outside Chicago/Philly/NYC? You still get a row: the Census geocoder supplies normalized address + coordinates with match_confidence: "geocoded" and no parcel/owner.

Why did my lookup come back fuzzy? Assessor rolls often disagree with common usage (suffix drift, canonical lot addresses). fuzzy means the right street was found but not a verbatim match — check situs_address to verify.

Can I look up thousands of addresses? Yes — pass up to 5,000 per run (maxResults). Each address = one result = $0.02.

How current is the data? Live API calls at run time. Philadelphia and NYC rolls are actively maintained; the Cook County parcel-universe vintage trails the assessor's cycle.