Aaron E. Lewis
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01 — FIELD NOTE

Who owns the rowhomes.

Every parcel in Baltimore City's real property file, matched by owner mailing address. One in five properties citywide is owned by an LLC or corporation — and most of those owners don't live anywhere near what they own.

DATASET: BALTIMORE CITY REAL PROPERTY, 238,382 PARCELS
SOURCE: OPEN BALTIMORE (DATA.BALTIMORECITY.GOV)
STATUS: LIVE EXTRACT — NOT A SAMPLE
02

By the numbers

03

The web — every LLC-owned home, connected to its owner

SCROLL/PINCH TO ZOOM · DRAG TO PAN · CLICK A DOT TO OPEN GOOGLE MAPS · CLICK A LEADERBOARD ROW TO SPOTLIGHT AN OWNER

04

Distance between property and owner

The split is bimodal. A large share of LLC owners are genuinely local — small Baltimore-area landlords and rehabbers within a few miles. But a real tail stretches the average out: 19% of LLC-owned residential parcels are registered to an out-of-state mailing address, and 802 parcels are owned from 1,000+ miles away.

05

Leaderboard — the biggest LLC owners in the city

OwnerPropertiesAssessed valueAvg. distanceMailing locationOwned from out-of-stateVacant

Assessed value is current land + improvement value (CURRLAND + CURRIMPR) per the city's own assessment, not market/sale price. Click a row to expand the owner's actual mailing addresses on file — most owners use more than one, which is why "out-of-state" counts don't always equal the full property count.

06

The interesting part

At the top of the list sits Armistead Homes Corp with 1,515 properties and zero miles of distance — but that's not a hoarding investor, it's a 1956 nonprofit resident cooperative in northeast Baltimore where members hold 99-year leaseholds; it's a "corporation" only in the legal-structure sense.

Strip that one entity out and the real investor story is underneath it: build-to-rent portfolios like Baltimore SFR Portfolio I/1A (Towson-based, 400+ homes between two shell entities), a cluster of small LLCs — Deera, Egbe Ventures, Zahav Ventures, Kesef Ventures — all mailing to the same Spring Valley, NY zip code, and a Philadelphia investor splitting its Baltimore holdings across six identically-structured "Baltimore Excel" LLCs, each staying just under the radar of any single-entity threshold.

THE MOST REMOTE OWNER
ON RECORD IS A ROWHOME
ON MONTFORD AVENUE.
ITS OWNER, "DC PROPERTIES
MARYLAND LLC," MAILS TO A
RESIDENTIAL STREET IN
WAIALUA, HAWAII —
4,853 MILES
FROM THE PROPERTY
IT OWNS.
07

Sources & methodology

  • Baltimore City Real Property Information, data.baltimorecity.gov (Open Baltimore) — full citywide extract, 238,382 parcels, downloaded live for this analysis.
  • US ZIP code centroid coordinates: simplemaps.com Basic US Zips database.
  • US state boundaries for the map: US Census Bureau cartographic boundary files, via the us-atlas project (Albers USA projection, which insets Alaska/Hawaii).
"LLC/corporate" = owner name matches common entity suffixes (LLC, Inc, Corp, LP, Trust, Holdings, Properties, etc.), excluding parcels flagged with a public-agency owner code or public-entity name pattern. "Residential" = city land-use code R (excludes commercial, industrial, and institutional parcels like CSX's rail corridor or hospital-system holdings, which are also technically "LLC/Inc" owned but aren't part of the housing-stock story). Distance is computed between the ZIP code centroid of the property and the ZIP code centroid parsed from the owner's mailing address on file — a real but approximate measure. Owner names are grouped by a normalized string match, so an LLC that varies its own punctuation across filings is still counted once. This is real, complete, unedited city assessment data — not a sample.