Commercial Real Estate Data Sources: Where Parcel, Ownership, Zoning, and Comps Data Come From

Almost every commercial real estate dataset, free or paid, traces back to a public record: the county assessor, the recorder of deeds, the municipal zoning ordinance, the building department. Paid platforms differ in how much of that record they collect, how they clean and link it, and what they add on top. Knowing the layers lets you pick the cheapest source that answers your actual question.

The layers of CRE data

Parcel and assessor data

The county assessor (or property appraiser) maintains the record of every parcel: boundaries, parcel number, land use code, lot size, improvements, assessed value, owner of record, and the tax-bill mailing address. It is free, authoritative, and updated on the county's schedule, which ranges from nightly to annually. The friction is scale: 3,000-plus counties, each with its own portal and field names.

Aggregators solve that. Regrid standardizes parcel boundaries and attributes nationwide and sells them as data and an API. ATTOM and Cotality (the company formerly known as CoreLogic) license enormous property databases to lenders, insurers, and software vendors. LightBox does the same for the commercial and environmental-due-diligence market. Plotzy licenses aggregated assessor data for 150M+ parcels across 3,200+ counties and puts it on a searchable map with zoning attached, which is the form most brokers and developers actually want it in.

Use the county directly when you need one parcel's official record or the document behind it. Use an aggregator or platform when you need to search across a market.

Ownership and contact data

Title is public at the county. The name behind an LLC is not, at least not in one place. The recorder of deeds holds the deed (whose signature block names the person who signed for the entity), and the Secretary of State holds the entity's registered agent and, in some states, its managers. Our guide on finding commercial property owners walks through it.

Paid platforms resolve entities at scale and attach contact information. Reonomy is the deepest for institutional ownership and debt; PropertyShark is strongest for address-level records in New York; Plotzy researches contacts at lookup time from Secretary of State filings, business listings, and people-search sources and attaches them to the parcel; PropertyRadar and RE HQ pair owner data with outreach tools. Prices in September 2026 run from about $60 a month to $500 a month per seat; the prospecting software comparison has the details.

Zoning and entitlement data

Zoning is the least standardized layer in commercial real estate. Every municipality writes its own ordinance, publishes its own map, and updates both on its own schedule. The primary sources are the city or county planning department's zoning map (increasingly an ArcGIS web map), the code itself (hosted on Municode, American Legal Publishing, or the city's site), and the planning staff who interpret it.

Zoneomics licenses standardized zoning data and reports across many municipalities. Gridics builds 3D zoning models for cities it has contracted with. Plotzy attaches two levels of zoning to every parcel (a category and the municipality's own designation such as R-1 or C-2) and adds Zoning AI, which reads the ordinance and answers questions about permitted uses, setbacks, FAR, height, and parking with the section cited. The zoning hub explains the common designations and where each city's official map lives.

Listings and comps

Sale prices are public in most states through the recorder, but a dozen states (Texas among them) are non-disclosure, and lease terms are never public. That is the gap CoStar, LoopNet, Crexi, and CompStak fill with verified listings, sale comps, and lease comps assembled from brokers and appraisers. MSCI Real Capital Analytics tracks large transactions and capital flows for institutional research. These are the most expensive datasets in the industry because they are the hardest to collect.

If you are prospecting land or off-market parcels rather than underwriting an income property, you may not need this layer at all. Prospecting tools like Plotzy deliberately leave it out to keep the price down.

Debt data

Mortgages and deeds of trust are recorded against the parcel and are public, including the lender and the original loan amount. Maturity dates and current balances usually are not. Reonomy and ATTOM aggregate recorded loans nationally; Trepp covers securitized commercial mortgages. Debt maturity is one of the best sell signals in the business, and it is only available at scale through these paid sources.

Permits and construction

Building permits are public at the city, and most cities now run online portals. Permit history tells you what an owner has invested in a property and what is under construction nearby. BuildZoom and Shovels aggregate permits nationally; Dodge tracks construction projects for suppliers and contractors. Plotzy's Production plan includes permit history where the county publishes it.

Demographics, traffic, and foot traffic

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey is free and sufficient for most site screens. State departments of transportation publish traffic counts. For retail and quick-service uses, Placer.ai and similar foot-traffic providers use mobile location data to estimate visits, and Esri's Business Analyst packages demographics, spending, and drive-time analysis.

Environmental and flood

FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer is free and is a hard constraint on many sites. The EPA publishes contamination and regulated-facility databases, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service publishes the National Wetlands Inventory. LightBox and Environmental Data Resources (EDR) package all of it into the Phase I environmental reports lenders require.

Free sources worth bookmarking

• County assessor and recorder portals for any county you work (NETR Online indexes them all)
• Secretary of State business search in your state
• The municipality's zoning map and code
• FEMA Flood Map Service Center
• Census Bureau data tools and your state DOT's traffic count map
• The city's permit portal

How to decide what to pay for

Start from the question. "Which parcels in this county could hold a 40,000-square-foot self-storage building?" is a parcel and zoning question; a platform that searches both together answers it in an afternoon. "Who owns this building and when does their loan mature?" is an ownership and debt question that only a data-heavy platform answers. "What did the last three industrial sales trade at?" is a comps question, and the comps vendors own it.

Most small teams end up with one platform for the layer that drives their business and free sources for the rest. That is a sensible stack.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best source of commercial real estate data?

There is no single best source. The county assessor and recorder are the authoritative source for parcels and ownership; the municipality is authoritative for zoning; sale and lease comps come from CoStar, Crexi, and CompStak; debt data comes from Reonomy, ATTOM, and Trepp. Pick the source that matches the layer you need.

Is commercial property data public?

Parcel boundaries, ownership of record, assessed values, deeds, and mortgages are public in every state. Sale prices are public in most states but not in non-disclosure states such as Texas. Lease terms, tenant data, and the people behind LLCs are not public in one place, which is what paid platforms assemble.

Where do commercial real estate platforms get their data?

From county assessors and recorders, Secretary of State filings, municipal zoning maps and codes, building permit portals, FEMA and Census data, and, for listings and comps, from brokers and appraisers who contribute deals. Platforms differ in how completely they collect the public record and what they add to it.

How much does commercial real estate data cost?

Public sources are free. Prospecting and parcel platforms run from about $60 to $500 a month per user in 2026. Comps and research terminals such as CoStar are quote-based and typically cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars a year.