Important Change to Property Owner Data in PatTrac

Summary

The monthly sales file we import into PatTrac has changed. The data provider has removed all owner information from the file—almost certainly as part of a broader effort to remove PII from publicly distributed records. This change affects the property table in PatTrac and will require action on your part.

What this means for your data

There are two immediate impacts:

1. New properties will import without an owner. Any parcel that comes across in a future monthly import will have a blank owner name.

2. Ownership changes will not be reflected. When a property is sold, the owner name in PatTrac will remain whatever it was previously. It will not update, and it will not be flagged as stale.

Existing owner data already in PatTrac is unaffected for now, but it will become progressively less accurate with each sale that goes unrecorded.

What we're doing

We have reached out to the Department of Assessments and Taxation regarding whether owner data remains available through another channel, and we will update you as soon as we hear back.

In parallel, we have begun conversations with several counties about obtaining SDAT data directly at the county level, where owner information is still present. If that path works, you would obtain the data from your county, and we would provide an import routine to load it into PatTrac.

We are also evaluating whether to clear existing owner names and open the field for manual entry. We have not made that decision, and we would like your input before we do.

What we're asking you to do

Please contact your county — assessments office, finance office, or whichever department handles property records locally — and ask whether owner-level property data is available to you. Knowing which counties can supply this and in what format will directly shape which solution we build.

If you learn anything useful, or if you have a preference on the manual-entry question, let us know.