An interactive map revealing who really owns New Haven's corporate-controlled properties.
▶ Replay intro 📖 Findings — Data investigations
In New Haven, thousands of rental properties are owned by shell LLCs — entities like "NETZ CONSOLIDATED III LLC" or "SHEER OPULENCE LLC" that obscure who actually controls them. Tenants, journalists, and policymakers have no easy way to see who the real landlords are, how many properties they control, or where they're concentrated.
Elm City Explorer links 6,953 corporate-owned properties to 421 identified ownership groups by tracing connections through public records. It answers questions like: Who owns the most property in my neighborhood? How many shell LLCs does this landlord operate through? When did they start buying?
Most corporate landlords operate through dozens of single-purpose LLCs. For example, "Mandy" (888 properties) operates through 100+ entities. We link them by:
Shared Principals Same person listed as principal across multiple LLCs
Shared Agents Same registered agent (excluding ~30 law firms and RA services)
Shared Addresses Same business address (excluding known law firm offices)
Pattern Matching Naming conventions (e.g., "NETZ *", "NHCD *", "BBYM *")
Clustering uses a Union-Find algorithm. Connected components form ownership groups. Coverage: 421 groups covering 4,577 of 6,953 properties (65.8%).
Interactive Map Building footprints colored by ownership group
AI Chatbot Ask natural language questions about the data (powered by Claude)
Neighborhood Analysis 20 neighborhoods ranked by corporate concentration
Group Profiles Researched blurbs on 70+ ownership groups
Network Graphs Visualize shell entity connections
Property Type Filters Residential, commercial, condo, institutional
Comparison Table Sort all 421 groups by value, count, entities
Printable Reports Per-group reports with full property listings
CSV Export Full dataset downloadable for analysis
Guided Tour Short product walkthrough, plus a separate key findings briefing
VGSI (gis.vgsi.com/newhavenct) — Property assessments, sale history, building footprints, zoning, use codes.
CT Secretary of State (CONCORD) — Business entity filings for 3,928 LLCs.
New Haven GIS — Neighborhood boundary polygons.
Data scraped and processed with Python. Entity resolution via Union-Find graph clustering. Frontend is a single HTML file (~2,500 lines) with no build step. AI chatbot uses Vercel serverless functions proxying to Claude Sonnet 4. Deployed on Vercel's free tier.
The data pipeline (scrape → cluster → map) generalizes to any city with public assessor and secretary-of-state data. We're starting with New Haven and planning to expand to Hartford, Bridgeport, Providence, and Boston.
This is a research tool, not a definitive ownership registry. Some connections may be spurious. Some owners may be missing if they don't file with CT SOS. Sale prices of $0 typically indicate related-party transfers. Data was scraped March 2026.