The Owner Lives Elsewhere: Out-of-State Ownership Across 36.4 Million Absentee Parcels

Luna County, New Mexico — the desert county around Deming — has the highest out-of-state ownership of any large county we measure. Of its 55,365 absentee-owned parcels with a readable US mailing state, 37,604 belong to an owner whose mail goes to another state: 67.9%. Those owners are spread across all 49 other states and the District of Columbia. California alone accounts for 5,162 of them.

Sarasota County, Florida is next at 65.4%. Walton County, on the Florida panhandle, is at 62.9%. Sandoval County, New Mexico, north of Albuquerque, is at 59.0%. Eleven of the fifteen counties at the top of the ranking are in Florida, three are in New Mexico, and the fifteenth is Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

Nationally, across the 36,484,469 absentee-owned parcels whose owner mailing address carries a recognizable US state, 6,736,700 are owned from another state: 18.4%.

Where the owner's mail goes to another state

The ranking covers counties with at least 50,000 absentee rows carrying a recognized US mailing state. The share is out-of-state rows divided by that base.

The table draws three regions. The Florida Gulf coast — Sarasota, Charlotte, Lee, Collier, Manatee — is owned from the Northeast and Midwest: Lee County's out-of-state owners lead with New York (14,337), Illinois (11,595), Ohio (10,380) and Michigan (9,455). The panhandle — Walton, Bay, Escambia — is owned from the drive-to states: Georgia is the top mailing state in Walton (5,608) and Bay (9,898), Alabama in Escambia (6,167). And the three New Mexico counties are owned from Texas: 23,605 of Sandoval's out-of-state owners and 27,215 of Valencia's get their mail there, 35.9% and 30.5% of each county's out-of-state total.

Two entries read differently on a closer look. Monroe County — the Keys — is at 45.5% because 14,026 of its 31,330 out-of-state addresses are in Washington, DC, and 13,880 of those rows carry the owner name "USA National Park Service" under three spellings. That is federal land, not landlords. Mecklenburg County and Duval County are the two urban entries, and their mailing states lead with Arizona and California rather than any neighboring state — Mecklenburg's out-of-state owners are 10,755 in Arizona and 6,187 in California; Duval's are 6,960 in California and 5,459 in Arizona. That is not the geography of second homes. The owner-name field can say what it is, and that is the obvious next cut.

Where it doesn't

The five lowest shares among the same 178 ranked counties:

Four of the five are what a low share should look like: commuter and local markets where an absentee owner is usually across town, not across a state line. Wake County is the exception, and we do not believe it. Wake and Mecklenburg are the two largest metros in the same state, and they print 0.4% and 43.5% — a hundredfold gap. That is more likely a difference in how the two counties publish the owner mailing address than a difference in who owns the houses. We publish the number as measured and flag it.

Across the 178 ranked counties the median share is 12.6%. Forty counties are at 25% or higher, nine are at 50% or higher, and 17 are under 5%.

The state picture

Every state in the table, ranked where it has at least 10,000 absentee rows with a recognized US mailing state. The last column is what the normalization threw out: rows whose mailing state is blank or unreadable.

* Flagged: a single destination state accounts for more than 60% of the out-of-state rows. New Hampshire's 12,742 out-of-state rows include 12,097 in Massachusetts; Missouri's 94,369 include 75,000 in Michigan. Both look like a source coding the mailing state wrong, not a finding, and neither should be quoted.

Among the large states the picture is steady: Florida 26.0%, North Carolina 21.5%, Texas 10.0%, New York 9.7%. Florida's out-of-state owners are led by New York (193,374), Texas (108,130) and Georgia (96,655). The right-hand column is the honest part of this table. Pennsylvania has 3,957,093 absentee rows and 29 with a readable mailing state; Minnesota, New York, Colorado, Iowa and Vermont each throw out more than a million. Those states are not low; they are unmeasured until their mailing-address field is fixed at the source.

Who owns Luna County

The top ten mailing states for the top-ranked county. The ten together hold 23,470 of Luna's 37,604 out-of-state parcels, 62.4%; the remaining 40 destinations hold the rest.

No single state dominates. The owners are simply everywhere.

Why it matters

"Absentee" is the standard owner signal: the owner's mail goes somewhere other than the property. Out-of-state is the stricter cut. An owner in the next town can drive past; an owner four states away cannot, and that distance is what property managers, tax offices, insurers and buyers of small lots are all pricing. A county where two-thirds of absentee owners are out of state is a different market from one where it is three percent, even if the absentee counts look alike.

It is also a caution about the field itself. The stored out-of-state flag on this table would have ranked Broward County, Florida first at 100.0%, because its source spells the mailing state "FLORIDA" on 675,780 rows and the flag compares that string to "FL". Normalized, Broward is 7.6%. A flag is only as good as the vocabulary underneath it, and the vocabulary here comes from every assessor export in 45 states.

Method

Base. The absentee_owners table on PropRaven's serving database, rebuilt on 2026-09-04 from the serving parcel corpus: one row per county-parcel where the owner mailing city or mailing state differs from the property's. 57,516,160 rows across 45 states (counting DC) and 2,068 county codes. This is not every parcel; it is the absentee cohort, and every denominator below is a subset of it. We did not scan the parcel corpus itself.

Normalization. The owner mailing state field mixes two-letter codes with full names ("FLORIDA", "Florida", "New York"), countries ("CANADA", 67,055 rows), Canadian provinces ("NU", 34,471), numerics ("43", 60,859) and typos ("PENNSLYVANIA", 2,259). We mapped two-letter USPS codes and full state names to a code and treated everything else as unreadable. 20,611,074 rows are blank and 420,617 unrecognized — of the latter, 177,490 are foreign, territory or military tokens and 132,914 are numeric-only. All 21,031,691 (36.5% of rows) are excluded from both numerator and denominator. The stored is_out_of_state flag was not used.

Measure. Denominator: rows whose mailing state resolves to a US state or DC, 36,484,469. Numerator: rows whose mailing state differs from the property's state, 6,736,700. Shares are rounded down to one decimal.

Floors and guard. Counties needed 50,000 rows in the denominator: 180 qualify. A county was removed when its out-of-state share exceeded 40% and one destination held more than 60% of its out-of-state rows: Jackson County, MO (74,936 of 77,629 out-of-state rows in Michigan) and Hamilton County, OH (78,485 of 105,021 in Texas). That leaves 178 ranked counties holding 25,352,955 denominator rows and 4,077,302 out-of-state rows. States needed 10,000 denominator rows to be ranked and are flagged by the same guard.

Rows, not parcels. The table's key is (county code, parcel id) and we did not deduplicate across counties. The serving corpus behind it carries 289,856,342 county rows for 191,288,445 distinct parcel ids, so a parcel filed under more than one county code is counted once per row here. Every count in this piece is a row count.

Selection. Which counties publish a mailing state decides who is in the denominator, so a state's figure describes its measurable counties, not the state. Wisconsin's 61.0% rests on 346,588 readable rows out of 1,013,815.

Coverage. Six states are not yet in the table: Georgia, Idaho, Maine, Nevada, Virginia and Washington. Four are in it with no readable mailing state at all: Arkansas, DC, Vermont and Hawaii. County names and state codes come from the county gazetteer, not from the assessor files. Field definitions are in the data dictionary.

Where this goes next

The Monroe County entry is the assignment. An out-of-state signal that cannot tell the National Park Service from a landlord in Ohio is a mailing-address signal, not an owner signal, and the owner-name field is sitting in the same row. Classifying government, institutional and individual owners is the next pass over this table.

The second job is the excluded 36.5%. Pennsylvania, Minnesota, New York, Colorado, Iowa and Vermont are unmeasured for a reason that has nothing to do with ownership: the mailing state is in a field the build does not read, or is not published. Each of those is a source fix, and each one turns a dash in the state table into a number. The six absent states follow the same path. And the normalization above is the fix the stored flag needs; it is a small one.

Methodology and data: PropRaven's absentee_owners table (rebuilt 2026-09-04, serving database), aggregated by county over its physical block ranges in twelve read-only passes and summed; county names from the county gazetteer. The core query, run per block range and summed:

SELECT state_fips, county_fips, left(upper(btrim(owner_state)), 40) AS raw_state, count(*)
FROM absentee_owners
WHERE ctid >= '(0,0)'::tid AND ctid < '(100000,0)'::tid   -- 12 ranges of 100,000 blocks
GROUP BY 1, 2, 3;
-- raw_state mapped locally: USPS codes and full state names -> code; anything else excluded.
-- out_of_state = (code <> property state); property_state is the USPS code of state_fips.

SELECT county_fips, state_fips, state_abbr, county_name, state_name FROM usfs_wildfire_risk;

SELECT owner_state, count(*) FROM absentee_owners
WHERE county_fips = '12011' GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 12;   -- Broward vocabulary

SELECT owner_name, count(*) FROM absentee_owners
WHERE county_fips = '12087' AND upper(btrim(owner_state)) = 'DC'
GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC LIMIT 6;                                 -- Monroe County, DC owners

Figures are as of 2026-09-05 and are restated when the table is rebuilt.

The parcel, deed, and permit records behind these numbers — 191.3M parcels — are searchable at propraven.com.