Terms of Use

1. Who this is between

This site is operated by Free Parcel Data — "we", "us", "our". These terms are between us and you, the person using the site. Using the site means you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

Two other documents form part of this agreement and are incorporated into it: the Privacy Policy and the data accuracy and no-warranty statement. Read all three.

2. What this site is

We publish copies of parcel data produced by county governments — assessors, appraisal districts, recorders and GIS departments. Some of those copies come from an archive of previously collected county files. Some are contributed by users of this site. Every dataset is a snapshot of one county as it stood on one date.

We are not a county, an assessor, a recorder, a title company, a surveyor or a government agency, and we are not affiliated with any of them. Nothing here is the official record of anything. The county's own record is the official record, and where the two disagree the county is right.

Everything on this site is provided for reference and educational use only. Section 11 sets out what that means and what you must not rely on this data for.

3. Your account

You can browse and download without an account. Some features need one.

• You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms on your behalf.
• Give us a real email address you control, and keep it current. Downloads are tied to a verified email.
• One person, one account. One verified email address may hold one active account.
• Do not share your account, your password, or a download link with anyone else. What happens under your account is your responsibility.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone else is using your account.

4. Using the data

Subject to these terms, you may download the files we publish and use them — including commercially — for your own purposes, and you may share the results of your work. We do not charge for that and we do not ask for attribution, though we appreciate it.

Two limits on that permission, and both are real:

• We cannot grant rights we do not hold. The underlying records are the counties'. Whatever rights you have in them come from the law of the state that produced them and from the county's own terms, not from us. Nothing on this site is a licence to the underlying records and nothing here is a representation that any particular use of them is permitted.
• Some counties impose their own conditions. A county may require attribution, restrict redistribution, restrict commercial use, or prohibit using its records to build a mailing list. Those conditions bind you whether or not they are reproduced here, and it is your job to check them with the originating county before you rely on, redistribute or resell anything.

If a county tells us that a dataset should not have been published, we will take it down. See removal and takedown requests.

5. What you must not do

The catalogue as a whole is the thing this site is built to give away one county at a time. Taking it all at once is not what the free service is for, and the following are breaches of these terms — not merely blocked, but prohibited:

• Scraping, crawling, harvesting or automated downloading of datasets, beyond what our robots.txt permits for ordinary search indexing.
• Using scripts, headless browsers, or any automated means to request downloads, create accounts, or submit forms.
• Circumventing or attempting to circumvent any quota, rate limit, credit cost, email verification, access control or anti-abuse measure — including by rotating IP addresses, using proxies or VPNs to appear as different users, or using disposable email addresses.
• Creating or operating more than one account, or using accounts held by other people, whether or not they consent.
• Co-ordinating with others so that your combined downloads exceed what any one of you could take.
• Downloading a substantial part of the catalogue, or systematically downloading counties in order to assemble a regional or national dataset.
• Reselling, sublicensing or redistributing the catalogue, or any substantial part of it, as a dataset or as a service.
• Sharing, reselling or publishing download links, which are issued to you and are single-use.
• Using owner names or mailing addresses from this data to harass, stalk, threaten or intimidate anyone, or in any way that breaks the law that applies to you.
• Probing, scanning or testing the security of the site, or interfering with its operation.
• Uploading anything containing malware, or anything designed to break our processing pipeline.
• Misrepresenting who you are, or what a dataset you submit is.

We monitor for these patterns and we act on them. Depending on what we see, we may throttle your access, cancel a download, remove credits, suspend your account or close it. We do not owe you notice before doing any of that, though we will usually give it.

6. Uploading data

This section applies to every file, description, note, verdict or other material you submit. We call all of it "your contribution".

What you promise

By submitting a contribution, you represent and warrant that:

• You own it, or you have every right and permission needed to submit it and to let us do everything in the licence below.
• You are not barred from sharing it by any contract, licence, terms of service, subscription agreement, employment agreement, confidentiality obligation, protective order or law. If you obtained the data from a vendor, an employer, a client or a paid service, you have checked, and you may share it.
• You did not obtain it by breaching anyone's terms of service, by circumventing a technical restriction, or unlawfully.
• It is what you say it is: the county you named, the vintage you claimed, and not a file you altered to appear newer, larger or more complete than it is.
• It contains no information that is sealed, confidential, protected by an address-confidentiality programme, or otherwise legally restricted from publication, so far as you know.
• It contains no malware and nothing that infringes anyone's rights.

These promises matter more here than on most sites, because we publish what you give us and other people download it. If a contribution turns out to breach any of them, section 13 applies.

The licence you give us

You keep whatever rights you have in your contribution. You grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully paid, transferable licence, sublicensable through multiple tiers, to host, store, copy, back up, scan, analyse, validate, index, convert, reformat, reproject, clip, combine with other data, excerpt, create derived works from, publish, distribute, transmit, publicly display and otherwise make available your contribution, in whole or in part, in any format and by any means now known or later developed, for any purpose connected with operating, improving, promoting or defending this service — including making it available to other users, free of charge or in exchange for credits.

To the extent the law allows, you waive any moral rights and any right of attribution in your contribution, and you agree we owe you no payment for any of this beyond the credits described in section 7.

The licence survives the closure of your account and the removal of your contribution from the site, for one practical reason: other people will already have copies, and we cannot recall them.

What we may do with it

• We are not obliged to publish anything you submit, or to keep publishing anything we have published.
• We may reject, quarantine, edit, reformat, relabel, un-publish or delete any contribution at any time, for any reason or none, with or without telling you.
• We may publish a contribution with the results of our automated checks attached, including where those checks are unflattering or inconclusive.
• We may reverse credits awarded for a contribution if it later turns out to be mislabelled, fraudulent, duplicated, infringing, or submitted in breach of the promises above.
• Withdrawing a contribution removes it from the site going forward. It does not undo distribution that has already happened.

7. Credits

Credits are an internal accounting mechanism that governs access to parts of this site. They are not a purchase and they are not a product.

• Credits have no cash value. They are not money, not currency, not legal tender, not a stored-value instrument, not a gift card or gift certificate, not a security, and not your property.
• Credits cannot be bought from us. We do not sell them.
• Credits are not refundable, not redeemable for cash or for anything outside this site, and cannot be exchanged, transferred, sold, gifted, traded or inherited.
• A credit balance is a number in our records, not a debt we owe you. It is not held on trust for you and it is not subject to unclaimed-property treatment.
• Holding credits does not entitle you to any particular dataset. Datasets are added, changed and withdrawn.
• We may change what a contribution earns and what a download costs, at any time, including for actions already taken but not yet settled.
• We may adjust, withhold, expire, freeze or revoke credits — including a whole balance — where we believe they were awarded in error, obtained by abuse or fraud, or earned in breach of these terms.
• Credits are forfeited when your account closes, whoever closes it.
• We may change or discontinue the credit system entirely, at any time, without compensating anyone.

How credits are earned and spent today is described on the contribute page. That page is documentation, not a promise.

8. Advertising

This site is supported by advertising. Third-party ad networks serve most of those ads and set their own cookies; the Privacy Policy explains what that means and how to opt out of personalised advertising.

An advertisement is not a recommendation. We do not vet advertisers, their products or the sites they link to, and we are not responsible for anything you do with them.

9. Availability and termination

This is a free service. We make no commitment about uptime, response time or the continued availability of anything.

• We may add, change, suspend or remove any feature, dataset, county, format or vintage at any time.
• We may impose or change limits on downloads, uploads, storage and file sizes.
• We may suspend or close your account at any time, with or without notice, and in particular where we believe you have breached these terms.
• We terminate the accounts of repeat copyright infringers in appropriate circumstances.
• You may close your account whenever you like by writing to privacy@freeparceldata.com.

Sections 4 to 7 and 11 to 15 survive termination, along with any other provision that by its nature should.

10. The site itself

We claim nothing in the underlying public records. We do own this site: its name, design, code, page copy, the way the catalogue is selected and arranged, the coverage rollups, the quality and completeness scores, and the results of our verification pipeline. Do not copy, scrape or reproduce those.

11. No warranty — reference and educational use only

Everything published on this site is provided for reference and educational purposes only. It is a copy of a public record as it stood at one moment, republished by a third party, and it is not fit for any purpose where being wrong costs something.

Do not use this data, and do not rely on it, to:

• determine a property boundary, a corner, an acreage, an easement or an encroachment;
• determine ownership, title, or any legal or equitable interest in land;
• carry out or support a transaction, financing, appraisal, valuation, insurance decision, tax appeal, or any legal filing;
• plan emergency response, engineering, construction or siting work;
• establish or demonstrate regulatory compliance;
• make any decision where an error could cause loss to you or to anyone else.

For those purposes you need a licensed surveyor, a title search, and the county's official records. Verifying anything you rely on against the county's record is your responsibility, not ours. You use this site at your own risk and you assume that risk entirely.

THE SITE, THE DATASETS, THE METADATA, THE QUALITY SCORES AND EVERYTHING ELSE WE MAKE AVAILABLE ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, FREE PARCEL DATA DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, QUIET ENJOYMENT, ACCURACY AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE DATA IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE, CURRENT, RELIABLE OR FIT FOR ANY PURPOSE, THAT THE SITE WILL BE AVAILABLE OR ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY DEFECT WILL BE CORRECTED. NO ADVICE OR INFORMATION, ORAL OR WRITTEN, OBTAINED FROM US CREATES ANY WARRANTY.

Nothing on this site is professional advice of any kind, and using it creates no professional relationship between us.

The data accuracy statement sets out in detail what the data is, where it comes from and what it cannot tell you. It is part of these terms.

12. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, FREE PARCEL DATA AND ITS OWNERS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS AND SUPPLIERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, BUSINESS, GOODWILL, DATA, OR ANTICIPATED SAVINGS, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THIS SITE, THE DATA, YOUR USE OF EITHER, OR YOUR INABILITY TO USE EITHER — WHETHER THE CLAIM IS IN CONTRACT, TORT, NEGLIGENCE, STRICT LIABILITY, STATUTE OR OTHERWISE, AND EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN TOLD THAT SUCH DAMAGES ARE POSSIBLE.

THIS INCLUDES, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ANY LOSS ARISING FROM DATA THAT IS INACCURATE, INCOMPLETE, OUT OF DATE, MISLABELLED OR MISSING; FROM RELIANCE ON ANY PARCEL BOUNDARY, OWNER NAME, ADDRESS, ACREAGE, VALUATION OR LEGAL DESCRIPTION; FROM ANY DECISION YOU OR ANYONE ELSE MAKES ON THE BASIS OF THIS SITE; AND FROM ANY UNAVAILABILITY OF THE SITE OR LOSS OF CREDITS.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SITE WILL NOT EXCEED THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU HAVE PAID US FOR IT. THIS IS A FREE SERVICE, SO THAT AMOUNT IS ZERO UNITED STATES DOLLARS (US$0.00).

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is so, the exclusions and limits above apply to you only as far as that state's law allows, and nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for fraud.

You agree that these limits are a fundamental part of the bargain between us, and that without them we could not offer this site free of charge.

13. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Free Parcel Data and its owners, officers, employees, contractors and agents from and against any claim, demand, investigation, loss, liability, damage, cost or expense — including reasonable legal fees — arising out of or related to:

• your use of the site or of any data you obtained from it;
• any contribution you submitted, including any claim that it infringed someone's rights or was submitted in breach of a contract, licence or law;
• your breach of these terms; or
• your violation of any law or of anyone else's rights.

We may take over the defence of any such claim at your expense, and if we do, you will co-operate with us. You will not settle anything that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

14. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. When we do, we will change the effective date at the top of this page, and for a change that materially affects your rights we will also give notice on the site.

Changes take effect when published. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the new terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the site and close your account.

15. General

Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which the operator is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

Severability. If any part of these terms is held unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest continues in force.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, that is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these terms. We may, to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets.

No third-party beneficiaries. Nobody outside this agreement acquires rights under it.

Entire agreement. These terms, the Privacy Policy and the data accuracy statement are the whole agreement between us about this site, and they replace anything said before.

Contact. Write to legal@freeparceldata.com.