How “What’s changing around me?” works
Public agencies publish records one at a time. This page connects them by place and time, and explains exactly how.
Your address stays on your device
The address lookup runs in your browser against a copy of the county’s address points. When you type, the page downloads the list of addresses on streets beginning with the same few letters, the same file for everyone, and finds your address locally. The records around it are downloaded as fixed map squares. Nothing you type, and neither the location nor any parcel number, is sent to Tampa Thinks, to analytics, or to anyone else. The address is not put in the page link and is forgotten when you leave.
Sources
- Public property-assessment and recorded-sales data for Hillsborough County: sales history, the current parcel roll (use, year built, heated area) and parcel locations, refreshed weekly; October parcel rolls from 2015 and 2020 for comparisons over time.
- City of Tampa (CC0): active building permits and active development cases (collected daily), capital improvement projects, and the countywide address points used for the lookup.
- Plan Hillsborough (Hillsborough County City-County Planning Commission): residential and demolition permits for every jurisdiction from 2021 (updated about once a year), plan amendments, and a rezoning history that stopped taking new cases in August 2025. Data credit: The Planning Commission.
About the property data
The property records are compiled for assessment purposes. They are not a survey and not a tax roll, and all of the data is subject to change. Exact ownership, size or location can’t be determined from them. Some information in them may originate with other agencies. Tampa Thinks selects, combines and summarizes these records; every calculation, modification and interpretation on this site is Tampa Thinks’ own responsibility and does not represent the authorization or endorsement of any agency.
What this version doesn’t cover
Some public sources couldn’t be included because their publishers haven’t stated terms that allow republishing. Where a source is missing, the report says so. A missing record means “not covered”, never “none”.
- Hillsborough County’s own permit, zoning-hearing and capital-project records. Outside the City of Tampa, permits come only from Plan Hillsborough’s yearly extract (residential and demolition permits, ending with its latest update), and open rezoning cases and county projects aren’t shown.
- Florida Department of Transportation construction projects.
Each source’s date appears at the bottom of every report. Sales are shown “through” a date: sales take weeks to reach county records, so each update measures how complete the newest weeks are (countywide, against the same weeks a year earlier) and leaves out any that are not yet complete.
Definitions
- Single-family home
- A parcel the property roll codes 0100, “single family residential”. Townhouses, condominiums, apartments and mobile homes are counted separately and never combined into one median.
- Year built
- The property roll’s “actual year built” for the main building. It is a value in the roll, not a completion or move-in date.
- Share built in the last decade
- Single-family homes whose year-built value falls in the ten completed calendar years before this year, divided by all single-family homes in the circle that have a year-built value. Compared with the same measure for the City of Tampa or the county.
- Qualified sale
- A sale the assessment records flag as qualified (an arm’s-length, open-market sale). Transfers between relatives, foreclosures, quitclaims and similar are not counted as sales.
- Single-family sale
- A qualified sale of one single-family parcel that had a building when it sold, and whose current year built is not later than the sale year (otherwise the roll describes a different building).
- Price per square foot
- Sale price divided by heated area. For the five-year comparison, older sales use the heated area from the roll nearest the sale.
- Housing replacement
- Of the homes that stood in the October 2015 roll and sold between 2016 and 2019, the share that today have a year built later than the sale year or are recorded as vacant land. Shown only with at least 100 such homes and a share of 3% or more.
- New construction, demolition, major renovation
- From each permit source’s own type: new buildings (with units or at least 500 new square feet), removal of buildings (not pools, sheds, fences or interior work), additions, and renovations valued at $100,000 or more. Smaller permits are counted but not listed.
How records are connected
Records are joined on the parcel number (folio) used in the property roll. Permits without one are matched only when their address equals exactly one parcel’s address. A chain lists records on one parcel in date order, for example: a sale, then a demolition permit, then a new-construction permit, then the current roll’s year built. The rules:
- A demolition permit must come after the sale (within five years), and a new-construction permit after the demolition (within four).
- When a sale and a permit fall in the same month and one is only dated by month, their order is unknown, so they are not chained.
- Demolition is never assumed. Where no demolition permit exists (records start in 2021), the chain says so.
- A chain shows order only. It does not say why one record followed another.
Status words
A filed application is not an approval. A permit is not proof that work happened. A planned project is not a funded one, and a funded project is not necessarily under construction. Each record shows its status as the agency publishes it. Public project budgets are shown project by project and never added up: a project’s budget doesn’t belong to the area it passes through, and agencies sometimes list the same work.
What is left out, and known gaps
- Parcels whose owners are protected by Florida’s public-records exemption are removed from every figure, list and map.
- Owner names, buyer and seller names, mailing addresses, applicants, contractors and staff contacts are never used or shown. Free-text permit descriptions are not shown.
- City of Tampa permits: only active permits are published with locations; history comes from Plan Hillsborough from 2021 and is dated by month. Plant City and Temple Terrace have only that history.
- Figures with too few records are not shown. Medians need 20 sales; a change needs 50 sales in each period and is described as up or down only when a 90% bootstrap interval excludes zero.
- Places are described, never ranked or scored.