This page exists to correct one mistake, because it is the mistake behind most out-of-state owner lists that get bought and then quietly stop being used.
An out-of-state owner is not someone who moved in from another state. It is someone who is not there.
The flag compares the owner’s mailing address to the property’s state. A family that relocates from Illinois to Texas and lives in the house they bought updates their mailing address to that house — and reads as an in-state owner from the day they move in. The flag has, if anything, excluded them.
What the counts actually look like
These are the figures we published alongside where people are moving, derived from a national parcel table of 85,061,162 single-family homes.
| Measure | Count | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| Homes with an out-of-state owner mailing address | 3,996,396 | About 4.7% of single-family stock |
| …of which also flagged owner-occupied | 308,465 | Roughly 7.7%. The other ~92% are not lived in by their owner |
| Homes sold in the trailing year | 3,665,576 | About 4.3% of stock changed hands |
| …of which owner-occupied | 2,544,602 | 69.4% — the closest honest proxy for a household move-in |
| Recent sales that are both owner-occupied and out-of-state | 55,286 | 1.51% of recent sales — the actual size of the overlap people assume is the whole category |
That last row is the argument in one number. If you buy an out-of-state owner list expecting recent arrivals, roughly one and a half percent of the recent sales in it will match what you had in mind, and you will conclude the data was bad. The data was fine. The field meant something else.
Why the confusion is so durable
Because the phrase reads like a description of a person and is actually a description of an envelope. “Out-of-state owner” sounds like “out-of-state buyer”, and buyer-relocation is a thing people genuinely want to target — new arrivals are famously receptive, they need contractors, and they have not yet chosen anyone.
The trouble is that parcel data has no field for where someone lived before. There is no previous-state-of-residence column to filter on, so the nearest-looking field gets recruited to do a job it cannot do. That is why we built our own relocation analysis on new construction and turnover rather than on this flag at all.
What the flag is genuinely good at
Used for its actual meaning, it is one of the sharper selectors in property data — because it is nearly impossible to fake. Nobody self-reports being an investor; they just tell the county where to send the tax bill.
- Isolating non-occupants with high confidence. An owner receiving mail in another state is very unlikely to be sleeping in the house.
- Finding second homes. In vacation markets, this flag is largely a second-home detector, and it clusters accordingly — coastal, mountain, lake, sunbelt.
- Finding remote landlords. Owners managing at a distance have different problems from local ones: they cannot inspect casually, they rely on a manager, and they make decisions on documents rather than on walking the property.
- Finding inherited property. Someone who inherited a house in the state they left is the classic profile here.
Out-of-state versus absentee
These are not synonyms, and the difference matters when you are sizing a campaign.
Absentee means the mailing address differs from the property address at all — including an owner who lives twelve minutes away. It is the superset, and in most markets it is dominated by small local landlords.
Out-of-state is the subset where the mailing address crosses a state line. It is much smaller, skews strongly toward second homes and inheritors, and behaves differently on the phone — a landlord in the next town will meet you at the property, and one three states away will not.
If your list is meant to reach owners who cannot easily visit, out-of-state is the right filter. If it is meant to reach rental operators generally, it is far too narrow, and how to find absentee owners covers the wider selection.
Building the list properly
- Standardise both addresses before comparing. State comparison is more forgiving than full-address comparison, but the mailing address still needs to parse.
- Decide whether you want entities. Registered agents and management companies sit out of state routinely, and they will dominate an unfiltered pull in some counties.
- Keep the owner-occupied flag as a separate column rather than assuming it from the mailing address. The 308,465 records where both are true are real, and they are usually a data conflict worth understanding rather than a group to target.
- Enrich against the mailing address. Matching contact data to the property finds the tenant. This is the single most common way an out-of-state list gets ruined after purchase — see how to find a homeowner’s phone number.
- Script for a distant owner. No urgency, no discomfort, no spouse at the door — the pitch is economic and the proof has to travel.
If you actually wanted new arrivals
Then the field you want is not this one. A household that recently bought and lives in the house shows up as a recent arms-length sale with an owner-occupied flag — which is a different query producing a different and much larger population: 2,544,602 owner-occupied sales in the trailing year against 55,286 that are also out-of-state. That build is covered in how to find new movers, and the tenure background for why the window closes is in how long people stay in their homes.
Frequently asked questions
What does “out-of-state owner” mean on a property record?
That the owner’s mailing address is in a different state from the property. It is a comparison between two fields on the assessment record, nothing more. It does not mean the owner recently arrived from that state, and it does not mean they are moving.
How many out-of-state property owners are there in the U.S.?
Across a national parcel table of 85,061,162 single-family homes, 3,996,396 carry an owner mailing address in a different state — about 4.7% of the stock. Only 308,465 of those are also flagged owner-occupied, so roughly 92% of out-of-state owners do not live in the property.
Are out-of-state owners good leads?
For anything sold to a property investor, yes — they are a clean way to isolate owners who are almost certainly not living in the house. For anything sold to a resident, no, and the flag will actively work against you, because the owner-occupants you want are by definition mailing to the property itself.