Understanding Who Owns Your City

Welcome to the first Monthly Spotlight, where we share new features and use cases for BuildingBlocks and Slate. This month, we're focused on ownership: two BuildingBlocks updates that make it easier to see who owns property in your city and how those owners are connected.

Enhanced Identity Linking

Property owners large and small often hold real estate through multiple limited liability companies (LLCs), which can make it nearly impossible to keep track of who owns your city. Tolemi's proprietary Identity Linking reduces the guesswork (and the legwork) by connecting related properties and owners based on shared details like mailing addresses and similar names.

We run a matching algorithm across all identity data in our system to flag potentially related entities:

• Name similarity: The first level of matching looks at how closely owner names resemble each other. For example, MAPLE STREET HOLDINGS LLC and MAPLE STREET HOLDINGS II LLC would be flagged as a high-probability match.
• Shared mailing addresses: The second level looks at the owner's mailing address. Two completely unrelated names that both receive their tax bill at the same address would also be flagged as a high-probability match.
• Deeper record matching: The algorithm can also comb through property and billing records to flag connections like a shared water billing address or a common phone number provided to a rental registry.

Corporate Ownership Flags

BuildingBlocks now makes it easier to tell corporate owners apart from owner-occupants and other individual owners.

• Business Entity Type filter: Select only properties owned by an entity with a corporate flag in its name, such as LLC, Corporation, or Partnership.
• Is Business filter: Rolls those flags into a simple yes/no filter, so you can find every corporate owner or filter for non-corporate owners only.

Understanding who owns your city matters for your housing market. According to the Urban Institute, "as of June 2022, large hedge funds owned around 574,000 single-family homes nationwide. Twenty-seven percent of single-family homes sold during the first three months of 2023 were purchased by large financial groups."

More corporate ownership features are on the way. Want to learn more about Identity Linking? Reach out to our team.