The Loveland Blog

July 2020 - Parcel Data Update

By Sahana Murthy on July 2, 2020 · Democratizing Data

Dear Friends of Loveland Parcel Data and landgrid.com,

A lot of important information in this one!
A summary of updates in June of 2020 and the upcoming pipeline is below. 

Key Data Stats:

• Total parcel age down by 5% from last month
• Average parcel age - 205 days, down from 217 last month
• Average county age - 239 days, down from 241 last month
• ~500K parcels added online since last month

Quarterly Stats:

• Q2 2020 - We refreshed 918 counties
• Q1 2020 - We refreshed 929 counties

Land Based Classification System (LBCS) Use Codes update: We have been steadily standardizing county use and zoning codes into the LBCS standardized use codes for land use activity and function and have made some big improvements over the past month. We now have over 70% of our parcels with an LBCS code.

Readable LBCS code descriptions - new columns: Use codes are pretty dry and hard to understand when just numbers, so we added the description for each code to every parcel. Please take a look at these columns if land use or use codes are important to you, feedback is welcome.

Shapefile Important Information: We have had some support questions around shapefiles and have made some improvements to help with the issues shapefiles present. 

The shapefile format itself has a 'soft limit' of 2 gigabytes (GB) data. That means it is just a rule of the format "no data larger than 2GB" with no technical limit preventing more data being encoded as a shapefile. When we export large counties, our tools inform us the resulting shapefile is over that soft limit.

We can confirm that some software handles 2GB and larger shapefiles just fine (OSGeo tools), but some software will just silently ignore attribute data above the 2GB limit (ArcGIS). A sincere  thank you to the Loveland client who did a lot of in depth research and testing on this and shared their results with all of us.

Starting this month we have made the following changes to help flag the counties who's data exceeds the 2GB soft limit. Please double check how you are handling these files.

1. The filenames themselves will indicate the county generated the 2GB warning on export. '2GB_WARN' will be added to the file names so you can know just by checking the name.
2. We also added a column to our 'verse' table, named 'shapefile_size_flag' so you can check against the 'verse' table to see if a place is one that needs a different format than shapefile or generate a list of places you need to pull the alternate format for.

USPS Vacancy, Residential indicators: Now updated monthly. Updated in June 2020, next update in July.

Coverage Report: Updated for this month and available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1q0PZB72nO8935EMGmsh3864VjEAMUE-pdHcPkoAiS5c/

For all full dataset customers, the updated data is available for download to bulk data clients in these formats: GeoPKG .gpkg (suggested), GeoJSON, Shapefile, and Postgres SQL files.  In addition, this data has been updated on the landrid.com website.

If your organization uses a custom export we are updating your data at the moment and if you don’t see the latest updates, please drop us a line.

A Data Dictionary for the Loveland Standard Schema is always available here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14RcBKyiEGa7q-SR0rFnDHVcovb9uegPJ3sfb3WlNPc0/

A machine-readable version of this list is included in the `verse` table available in all the formats above as well as CSV format for use in spreadsheets. To find the latest updates in verse, sort by 'last_refresh' and use the 'filename_stem' column to identify the file.

Data refreshed or added from the county in May and live now:
( Asterisk * indicates newly added county)
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California - Contra Costa
Florida - Miami-Dade
Georgia - Douglas, Fayette, Henry
Indiana - Elkhart
Michigan - Berrien*, Hillsdale*
New Jersey - Atlantic, Bergen, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Essex, Gloucester, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Salem, Somerset, Sussex, Union, Warren
Nevada - Carson City, Churchill, Clark, Douglas, Elko, Eureka, Humboldt, Lander, Lincoln, Lyon, Mineral, Nye, Pershing, Storey, Washoe, White Pine
New York - Steuben
Ohio - Lucas, Medina, Portage
Texas - Briscoe*, El Paso, Hale, Hall, Hamilton*, Hansford, Hardeman*, Hardin, Harris, Harrison, Hartley, Haskell, Hays, Hemphill*, Henderson, Hidalgo, Hill, Hockley*, Hood, Hopkins*, Houston, Howard, Hudspeth*, Hunt, Irion, Jack*, Jackson*, Jasper, Jeff Davis, Jefferson, Jim Hogg, Jim Wells, Johnson, Jones, Karnes, Kaufman, Kendall, Kenedy*, Kent, Kerr, Kimble, King, Kinney, Kleberg, Knox*, La Salle, Lamar, Lamb, Lampasas, Lavaca, Lee, Liberty, Limestone, Lipscomb*, Live Oak, Llano, Loving, Lubbock, Lynn, Madison, Marion, Martin, Mason, Matagorda, Maverick, McCulloch, McLennan, McMullen, Medina, Menard, Midland, Milam, Mills, Mitchell, Montague, Montgomery, Moore, Morris, Motley*, Nacogdoches*, Navarro, Newton, Nolan, Nueces, Oldham*, Orange, Palo Pinto*, Panola, Parker, Parmer, Pecos, Polk, Potter, Presidio, Rains, Randall, Reagan, Real, Red River, Reeves, Refugio, Roberts*, Robertson, Rockwall, Runnels*, Rusk, Sabine*, San Augustine, San Jacinto, San Patricio, San Saba, Schleicher, Scurry, Shackelford, Shelby, Sherman*, Smith, Somervell, Starr, Stephens*, Sterling, Stonewall, Sutton, Swisher, Tarrant, Taylor, Terrell, Terry, Throckmorton, Titus, Tom Green, Travis, Trinity, Tyler, Upshur, Upton, Uvalde, Val Verde, Van Zandt, Victoria, Walker, Waller, Ward*, Washington, Webb, Wharton, Wheeler, Wichita, Wilbarger*, Willacy, Williamson, Wilson, Winkler, Wise*, Wood, Yoakum, Young, Zapata, Zavala

Wisconsin - Milwaukee

In the current pipeline for updating in July 2020
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We have a wider range of states, but fewer counties in each one than the past few months. These will let us add some missing rural counties and refresh some larger metro areas.

California - 3
Georgia - 2
Illinois - 2
Louisiana - 1
Massachusetts - Statewide
Michigan - 2 
Missouri - 26 counties
New York - 4
Oklahoma - 1
Oregon - 2
Pennsylvania - 1
South Dakota - 6


In the pipeline for updating in August
--------------------------------------------------
Arizona
Wisconsin

Based on feedback and county challenges, pipeline planning is always subject to change. As always, please contact us if you have any questions about accessing or using the data, if you find issues with any of our data, or you have any comments or questions about our data in specific areas or states. We also love to hear from you about which counties or regions you’d like to see us update next, as it helps inform our planning process.

Thank you for being a part of Loveland!

Happy Mapping!

Blake Girardot

blake@landgrid.com

Loveland Data Team

313-649-LAND