How to Pull Texas Appraisal District Data for $4 (The Free Way Most People Miss)
Last week I requested an entire Texas county's property roll — every owner, every situs address, every appraised value, every legal description — for four dollars. Not a sample. Not a paywalled "leads" export. The whole roll. And the four dollars wasn't even for the property data — that part was free. The four dollars was for the GIS shapefile I asked for on top of it.
Most people pay list vendors and skip-trace services hundreds of dollars a month for a worse version of what the county will hand you for the price of a coffee you forgot in the car. I want to show you exactly how to go get it, because once you see the seam, you can't un-see it.
Why this is free in the first place
Two statutes do the work. The Texas Public Information Act says government records are presumptively public. And Texas Tax Code §25.027 specifically governs appraisal-roll information — it protects a few sensitive fields, but otherwise treats the appraisal roll as exactly what it is: a public record built with public money.
Translation: the appraisal district will give you the data. It's already paid for. You're not hacking anything, you're not scraping anything, you're not in a gray area. You're a member of the public asking for a public record, the way the statute says you can.
The two paths: free download, or one email
Texas has 254 counties, each with its own appraisal district (CAD). They fall into two buckets.
Bucket one — counties that just post the file. Several of the big ones publish bulk downloads with no email, no request, no waiting:
- Harris (HCAD) — hcad.org has free public download files (the real_acct and owners flat files)
- Tarrant (TAD) — tad.org has a downloadable appraisal roll ("Property Data — Full Set")
- Collin (CollinCAD) — collincad.org offers direct data downloads
For these, you don't talk to a human. You go to the data page, download the flat files, and you're holding the county.
Bucket two — counties that fulfill a one-line request. The rest take a short public information request email, and the cost is almost always $0 to $4 (some GIS files run up to ~$50, but the ownership data itself is typically free). The one I confirmed personally is Travis County (TCAD):
Ownership data — owner, situs address, value, parcel ID — is free via a public information request to [email protected] (or through traviscad.org/publicinformation). The GIS parcel shapefiles for the whole county are $4. If the file's big, they'll post it to an SFTP or cloud link.
That's the four dollars. One email, one county, every parcel.
The exact email I send
Don't overthink the request. Cite the two statutes so they know you know, name the fields you want, and offer to pay. Here's the template — copy it, swap in the county, send it:
Subject: Public Information Request — bulk appraisal/ownership data export
Hello,
Under the Texas Public Information Act and Tax Code §25.027, I'd like to request a bulk export of the appraisal roll / ownership file for [COUNTY] in any flat-file format you provide (CSV, pipe-delimited, or fixed-width). Fields of interest: parcel/account ID, owner name, situs (property) address, mailing address, legal description, land/improvement/market value, and property class.
If the file is large, an SFTP or cloud-drive link works great. Please let me know any cost and the best way to remit payment.
Thank you, [NAME]
Send that to the district's open-records or records-management address (Dallas uses [email protected], Bexar uses [email protected] — most CADs list theirs on a "Public Information" or "Open Records" page). Then you wait a few days. That's the whole acquisition step. One email gets you a complete, current, legal snapshot of every property in a county.
What's actually in the file
When it lands, you'll typically have, per parcel:
- Parcel / account ID — the unique key for the property
- Owner name — who owns it
- Situs address — where the property physically is
- Mailing address — where the owner gets their tax bill (often not the property — that gap alone is gold)
- Legal description — lot, block, subdivision
- Land / improvement / market value — what the district says it's worth
- Property class — residential, commercial, vacant, etc.
Hundreds of thousands of rows. Owners, addresses, and values for an entire county, in one file.
Here's the part most people miss
That file is, honestly, useless the moment you open it. It's a giant fixed-width or pipe-delimited dump with cryptic column codes, every district schema is a little different, and no normal person could do anything with it. It is ugly on purpose — government data almost always is.
That ugliness is the entire opportunity.
My friend Andy showed me a tool called AlcoholSalesTracker once and summed up the whole game in a sentence: it's just pulling data from publicly-listed places, improving the UI/UX, and customers buy it. That's it. That's the business. The county is slow and the file is hideous; you're fast and you can make it useful. Clean it, normalize the schema, make it searchable, cross-reference the mailing address against the situs address to find absentee owners, layer in the values to find equity — and suddenly the same data a vendor charges hundreds a month for is yours, fresher, for four dollars.
The government won't package it for you. It's not their job, and they're not built for speed. Yours is the speed-and-packaging gap. That gap is the arbitrage — public data that's technically free but practically locked up, turned into something people will pay for.
Go get a county
Pick one. If you want zero friction, start with Harris, Tarrant, or Collin and download the file tonight — nobody to email, nothing to wait for. If you want the cleanest free ownership data, send the template to TCAD and have Travis County in your inbox by the end of the week.
The statutes are written down. The email is right up there. The file is sitting on a server that your tax dollars already paid for.
Most people will read this and never send the email. You could.