Mapa catastral de Puerto Rico disponible en su totalidad en Landgrid.com

By Sahana Murthy on April 28, 2020

We are thrilled to announce that we now have the most recent, 2020 data available for Puerto Rico.

Well, we’ve had Puerto Rico data for some years — and helped develop a plan and budget for a community-driven island-wide property survey that could still come to life one day if the time is right — however, since 2016, we were unable to get updated, refreshed data for the island.

Not anymore! We recently received the most recent & updated data for all of Puerto Rico for 2020. That’s right – straight from a PR source.

We have added 38,635 additional parcels for Puerto Rico to our dataset: that brings us up to 1,523,802 parcels in total.

If you’re looking for the latest data for all of Puerto Rico, and we know many of you are since we get asked for this a lot, you can see it on the site at https://landgrid.com/store/us/pr.

If you need to export the raw data for use outside the site, email us at parcels@landgrid.com. It’s available for download and via API.

It is also available for self-serve download by the municipality on the Landgrid parcel data store: https://landgrid.com/store/us/pr

Loveland team members have made numerous visits to Puerto Rico and developed some good friendships on the island since Maria. We look forward to being back when the pandemic passes and it’s safe to travel, and we hope to be helpful on more local projects in the future.

Below, find some notable improvements & updates between the data we had in 2016 and the data we have now:

Hurricane Maria – Brief Analysis:

Our latest data update for PR also gave us some key insights into the possible impact of Hurricane Maria on the island’s property landscape – since Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017, we have one dataset prior to the hurricane and one after.

Please bear in mind that the data we discuss below can NOT be directly a result or impact of Maria (although speculatively, they could very well be). It’s also not possible for us to know the details of how the data is updated and maintained, and what might be missing that would add additional insight or otherwise impact the conclusions we draw below. We share some observations from the data here to help prompt further research and greater understanding of how things are changing over time.

Topo map, rainfall amounts, and Hurricane Maria’s path across Puerto Rico. Image from USGS. ^

Non-PR Ownership

A ‘mailing address’ is the place of record where an owner wants information (tax bills, other correspondence to property owners from the municipal government) to be sent. This makes it interesting data for analysis.

properties with non-Puerto Rico mailing addresses ^

• About 9% of Puerto Rico’s parcels for which we have owner mailing info list a non-PR mailing address currently. There are a further 1,600 properties that list a P.O. Box as the mailing address, for which location is difficult to determine.

  It’s worth noting here that it’s not possible to break out how much of this ownership is former Puerto Rico residents who now live abroad, and how much represents external investment / non-Puerto Rican ownership.

  Top 5 states with non-PR mailing addresses:
  Florida: 9,162
  New York: 8,756
  New Jersey: 3,294
  Texas: 2,617
  Massachusetts: 1,448

• There were 4,064 purchases in the 2.5 years since Maria (ie from Maria until March 2020) that list a non-PR owner mailing address. For context, there were 3,081 out-of-state purchases in the 2.5 years prior, showing a 24% increase since Hurricane Maria.

Sale Data (Pre & Post Maria)
In an attempt to compare apples to apples as much as possible within this quick analysis, we took Hurricane Maria as the inflection point. Since we’re just about 2.5 years after Maria as of this writing, we took a corresponding 2.5 years prior to Maria (March 2015). All post- and pre- Maria data below, unless otherwise noted, are working with this 2.5 year span on either side.

• In terms of overall sales numbers, we see a 10% decrease in volume:
  pre-Maria: 65,792
  post-Maria: 59,324
• There was a corresponding decline in sales greater than $100,000:
  pre-Maria: 21,446
  post-Maria: 19,248
  

Sales pre-Maria over $100,000


Sales post-Maria over $100,000

• In general, median sales prices fell in Puerto Rico after the hurricane. One exception was the San Juan area, which saw a rise in prices. While one might think that this market activity in San Juan might be related to outside investment, we found nothing to indicate that that was the case: sales in that area were no more likely to have non-PR addresses than on the island as a whole (right around 10%).

  

There’s much more to be learned from this dataset. If our software or the data itself can be helpful to your work, research, or advocacy in Puerto Rico please email us at team@landgrid.com.