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maschinenmensch / edifice

A database of the built environment in Chicago
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Scraper candidate: Cook County Recorder of Deeds #9

Open tplagge opened 11 years ago

tplagge commented 11 years ago

The Cook County Recorder of Deeds has a search engine that lets you find properties by PIN, among other things: http://12.218.239.81/i2/default.aspx

You get a wealth of information in reasonably parseable form. Among the most useful bits:

The terms of use may be problematic, however.

jpvelez commented 11 years ago

Great stuff. URL doesn't seem parseable, what tool / approach could you use to crawl the site, extract datapoints, and pull down documents?

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:29 AM, tplagge notifications@github.com wrote:

The Cook County Recorder of Deeds has a search engine that lets you find properties by PIN, among other things: http://12.218.239.81/i2/default.aspx

You get a wealth of information in reasonably parseable form. Among the most useful bits:

  • The actual sale price of the property. Comparing this to the assessed value would be very interesting.
  • The dates and parties to each property transfer. Transfers per unit per year would be a nice measure of neighborhood stability.

  • The owners of exempt properties like public housing, which isn't in the assessor data because no bill is mailed.

    — Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/maschinenmensch/edifice/issues/9.

tplagge commented 11 years ago

I didn't try to build a crawler because the terms of use of the site pretty explicitly forbid it. (That and the URL looked pretty opaque to me too.)

Given that I now know the county has all this sitting in a database, I'm pondering a FOIA request.

On Jan 17, 2013, at 5:12 PM, Juan-Pablo Velez wrote:

Great stuff. URL doesn't seem parseable, what tool / approach could you use to crawl the site, extract datapoints, and pull down documents?

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:29 AM, tplagge notifications@github.com wrote:

The Cook County Recorder of Deeds has a search engine that lets you find properties by PIN, among other things: http://12.218.239.81/i2/default.aspx

You get a wealth of information in reasonably parseable form. Among the most useful bits:

  • The actual sale price of the property. Comparing this to the assessed value would be very interesting.
  • The dates and parties to each property transfer. Transfers per unit per year would be a nice measure of neighborhood stability.
  • The owners of exempt properties like public housing, which isn't in the assessor data because no bill is mailed.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/maschinenmensch/edifice/issues/9.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub.

fgregg commented 11 years ago

I doubt that a FOIA would work, but maybe @eads has some thought about that.

ghing commented 11 years ago

I'd find the recorder of deeds data (or the assessor's data) useful, particularly property ownership information.