Historical residential US property data

What is ATTOM Data?

ATTOM is a leading provider of nationwide U.S. property data, covering more than 155 million homes across 3,000+ counties. Through Dewey, academic researchers access property records, transactions, automated valuations, and boundary layers from ATTOM under a single institutional license.

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What academic researchers should know about ATTOM property data

ATTOM pulls records from county assessors, recorders, GIS offices, permitting agencies, and federal sources, then standardizes everything into a consistent schema so you can focus on research instead of data cleaning. Coverage spans the residential and commercial housing stock with 100+ attributes per property, roughly ten years of sales and mortgage history, and regularly refreshed assessor filings.

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Why academic researchers choose ATTOM on Dewey

Real estate data is notoriously fragmented. County governments publish records in thousands of different formats on different update cycles, and most commercial property data is priced and licensed for industry buyers, not academics. Dewey licenses ATTOM specifically for research and consolidates it alongside 30+ other premium providers under one institutional subscription. Add complementary datasets like consumer mobility from Advan Research and PassBy, climate risk from ClimateCheck, and rental listings from RentHub or Dwellsy, and you can build multidisciplinary studies without stitching together separate contracts.

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Research ideas and use cases for ATTOM data

• Housing affordability and market dynamics. Economists use ATTOM's Assessor History, Recorder, and AVM data to track how home prices respond to interest rate moves, zoning changes, and local economic shocks. Granularity at the parcel level makes neighborhood comparisons possible at national scale.
• ‍Mortgage lending, credit access, and disparities. Researchers pair ATTOM Recorder mortgage originations with HMDA, census demographics, and consumer credit panels to study refinance frictions and disparities in access to credit. Recent work published in PLOS ONE examined racial and ethnic inequality in contemporary mortgage lending using ATTOM data on Dewey, and an SSRN working paper used ATTOM to study refinance frictions among FHA borrowers.‍
• Climate risk and insurance. Researchers at UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Alaska combined ATTOM property characteristics with climate and insurance data for a recent NBER paper on how homeowners insurance markets are adapting to climate change.‍
• Urban planning, land use, and neighborhood change. Combine ATTOM's School Attendance Boundaries and Neighborhood Boundaries with building permit and foot traffic data to study upzoning, school quality capitalization, and the spatial dynamics of new construction. NYU researchers used ATTOM alongside mobility data to study cardiovascular health outcomes in neighborhoods with greater tree canopy coverage.‍
• Foreclosures, distress, and financial resilience. ATTOM's foreclosure filings, auction records, and repossessed property data support research on default dynamics, the long tail of the 2008 crisis, and how policy interventions shape household outcomes.‍
• The built environment and applied engineering. Link ATTOM property records to environmental and construction data to study how the built environment shapes outcomes, as Purdue researchers did in published work on water loss restoration cost estimation.

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Dive deeper with Dewey documentation

Detailed information on onboarding with Dewey, data partner details, and technical documentation on data access.

View documentation

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