Have you ever wondered which zip codes in your city have the most real estate transactions? Or maybe you’ve wanted to know which city council district has the most vacant land? Whether you are a city planner, a real estate investor, or a curious citizen, The Philadelphia Department of Records‘ ‘Philly LandStat ‘ website allows you to access more than 650,000 individual pieces of property transaction data within the city. When we first announced the application in October 2008, it was only accessible from the City’s internal network. The Department of Records has recently released the application (which has just been updated with the latest real estate data) to the public.

LandStat incorporates information on property transactions from the Department of Records’ ParcelExplorer and PhilaDox applications and presents it in an interactive web application. Individual records from those applications were placed into ZIP Codes, City Council districts, wards, U.S. Census tracts, and blockgroups using the Unified Land Records System (ULRS) — winner of the Public Technology Institute 2008 Technology Solutions Award (Web & EGovernment category). Once aggregated to these districts, the resulting dataset could then be fed into Azavea’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF) software for publication and analysis over the web, covering such categories as mortgages, deeds, condominiums, the Real Estate Transfer Tax, and property type.

2008 Residential Parcels in Philadelphia’s City Council District #10.

Kaleidocade enables the end user to create thematic maps, chart trends over time, get detailed reports on specific geographic areas of interest, and perform complex analysis through a straightforward interface using only a web browser. Releasing the property data through KIF, rather than as a flat text file or raw database, gives those interested a set of easy-to-use tools to quickly and easily visualize the various datasets. Users can focus their queries on individual geographic areas or specific types of transactions, or take a step back and look at the data in a larger context, depending on what types of questions they’re trying to answer. It’s the hope of the project that as those answers are sought, a level of knowledge is gained that otherwise might not have been possible by simply looking at a listing of the facts and figures on their own.

To try LandStat, just point your browser to: http://www.phillylandstat.com. Registration is free, and will create an account where all of your searches and reports will be saved so that you can return to them later, but it’s not a requirement.

For more information on Kaleidocade, please contact Chip Hitchens at chitchens@azavea.com.