The organization¶
The Center for Opportunity and Wealth Data works to support wealth-building and close the wealth gap by strengthening the collection, quality, and accessibility of wealth-equity data. By centralizing data from multiple sources, building a partner network for data analysis, and conducting and promoting groundbreaking research, the Center equips policymakers, practitioners, and advocates with the insights they need to help families build, protect, and pass down wealth across generations.
For this project, the Center directed DrivenData to develop new methods to enumerate and characterize tangled titles.
”Tangled title”: A property title where ownership is unclear or disputed, often involving a mismatch between the owner listed on the deed and the property claimant.
”At-risk title”: Properties where some of the listed owners are deceased, or there are multiple owners who have received the property through inheritance.
”Heirs’ property”: Family-owned property inherited by multiple generations without the formal legal proceedings necessary to prove ownership.
The challenge¶
Tangled titles are difficult to study because they are difficult to see. Unlike formal property transfers, inheritance without probate leaves no consistent paper trail, meaning there is no single database that tracks them, and no universally agreed-upon criteria for what counts. Without standardized criteria or a centralized data source, even basic questions — how many tangled-title properties exist in a given city, and who owns them — are nearly impossible to answer at scale.
The Center engaged DrivenData to develop new methods for enumerating and characterizing tangled titles across multiple cities, producing findings that could be replicated, compared, and acted on.
The approach¶
DrivenData began by reviewing several studies to better understand the data sources and the criteria applied. The team found that studies tended to fall into two categories: national in scope or limited to a single city. In many cases, data is not disaggregated by race, or findings are aggregated to the national level and therefore not suitable for the Center's desired city-level analysis of the impact of tangled titles across different racial and ethnic groups.
To mitigate these limitations, DrivenData chose PropertyRadar, a unified source of property and owner data across the US. This allowed analyses for one city to be easily and consistently repeated for others. We found that PropertyRadar’s property-level details (condition, liens, transactions) supported the level of detailed comparison analysis the Center desired, and avoided the effort of unifying and harmonizing municipal datasets across different systems. At the same time, to validate our approach and data source, we used studies from Detroit and Philadelphia to compare their respective numbers and the aggregate value of tangled properties with our PropertyRadar results.
Under the Center’s leadership, the research approach worked from two perspectives: practitioners working on the problem, and researchers seeking new approaches to understanding tangled titles:
- For practitioners: What do the findings tell us about adjusting or strengthening intervention strategies?
- For researchers: What methods and data can we contribute to the field of tangled titles research?
The results¶
The research completed by the Center and DrivenData identified more than 32,000 tangled or at-risk properties, representing over $5.7 billion in trapped family wealth across the five cities. Sample results for three cities are presented below. Because race is unspecified (unknown) for many properties in the PropertyRadar database, these results likely underreport the number and value of tangled titles for Black-owned properties.
The research also found that the most prevalent characteristics of tangled titles vary across cities, suggesting that identification and intervention strategies may need to be locally tailored. In Baltimore, the “single owner deceased” criterion is associated with the most tangled properties, whereas in Philadelphia, tangled properties are more likely to be identified by transfer dates more than 50 years old.
The PropertyRadar-based approach showed strong similarities with estimates from other city-level studies, indicating it can be replicated in additional cities, providing a scalable foundation for future tangled titles research.
Read more in the Center's blog post on tangled titles.
