About Who Owns Lexington
Who Owns Lexington is an interactive ledger of the largest property owners in Lexington–Fayette County, Kentucky: 112 owners holding 5,289 parcels with a combined $7.6 billion in assessed (fair cash) value across roughly 22,600 acres. It was made by Paul Oliva, a local software engineer, as a public-records transparency project. Every number on the map traces back to an official government record.
Sources
| Source | What it provides | Custodian |
|---|---|---|
| Fayette County property roll (via qPublic.net) | Owner of record, property class, zoning, fair cash value, taxable value, acreage, address, neighborhood, and last sale for every parcel in the county — 115,301 unique parcels retrieved June 11, 2026 | Fayette County Property Valuation Administrator (PVA) |
| LFUCG Parcel GIS layer | Parcel boundary polygons, joined to PVA records by parcel number (PVANUM) | Lexington–Fayette Urban County Government, Division of GIS |
| Kentucky business-entity registry | Registered agents, principal-office addresses, and organization numbers used to link related LLCs into "family" groupings | Kentucky Secretary of State |
All three are public records. No private, paid, or scraped-from-commercial-source data is used. The basemap is © CARTO / © OpenStreetMap contributors.
Methodology
1. Retrieving the complete parcel roll
The PVA's public search caps every query at 1,000 results, so the county was retrieved in slices: taxable-value bands walked adaptively from $1 to $1 billion (178 bands), plus zip-code and property-class sweeps to capture tax-exempt parcels (which carry $0 taxable value). Slices were de-duplicated by parcel number into a roll of 115,301 unique parcels — effectively the county's complete ownership record as displayed by the PVA on June 11, 2026.
2. Ranking owners
Owner names were normalized (punctuation, spacing) and obvious government aliases merged — e.g. "LFUCG", "LEXINGTON FAYETTE URBAN CO GOVT", and departmental variants all roll up to the Lexington–Fayette Urban County Government. Private entities were NOT merged at this stage; each LLC ranks on its own. The catalog is the union of the top 60 owners by parcel count and the top 60 by total fair cash value (112 owners after overlap, excluding placeholder strings like "VACANT").
3. Mapping the parcels
Each owner's parcel numbers were joined to the LFUCG Parcel GIS layer by PVANUM. 97% matched; the misses are franchise/utility pseudo-parcels (which aren't real land) and brand-new condominium or subdivision parcels not yet in the GIS layer.
4. Tracing LLC families
For each privately held entity in the catalog we pulled its Kentucky Secretary of State registration and clustered entities that share any of: (a) the same individual registered agent, (b) the same principal-office address, or (c) an unambiguous brand name. Corporate registered-agent services (CT Corporation, CSC, Cogency, and similar) were excluded as cluster keys, since they serve thousands of unrelated clients. Five families emerged, including the Ball Homes family (428 parcels, ~$217M across six entities) and Anderson Communities (423 parcels, ~$133M across six entities).
Definitions
- Fair cash value (FCV) — the PVA's assessment of what the property would bring at a fair voluntary sale. Constitutionally required to track market value; in practice it often lags the actual market.
- Parcel — one PVA property card. A condo unit is a parcel; a 700-acre farm is also a parcel. That's why we rank by count and by value.
- Owner of record — the name on the PVA card as of the snapshot date, which reflects recorded deeds. Recent unrecorded sales won't appear.
- Public / institutional / private — our classification by owner name: governments and public agencies; universities, hospitals and churches; everyone else.
Caveats & known limitations
- The data is a snapshot of June 11, 2026. Ownership changes daily.
- Exempt government property frequently carries a $0 or token assessed value, so government rankings understate the real-world value of what they hold. The University of Kentucky's campus appears under "Commonwealth of Kentucky," the legal title holder for most of it.
- Related LLCs that share no registered agent, office, or brand will not be grouped — family totals are a floor, not a ceiling.
- About 3% of catalog parcels lack map geometry (utility pseudo-parcels and brand-new condos); they're counted in the totals but not drawn.
- Owner names appear exactly as the PVA records them, including misspellings.
Download the data
Everything behind the map, free to reuse with attribution to whoownslexington.com and the underlying public-records custodians:
- owners_index.json — the 112-owner catalog with rankings, totals, class mixes, SOS registration details, and family clusters (~46 KB)
- top_owners_combined.geojson — all 5,200 parcel polygons, WGS84, with owner/value/class properties (~3.9 MB)
- owners_top500_by_count.json — wider leaderboard, top 500 owners by parcel count, no geometry (~52 KB)
- fayette_parcel_roll_2026-06-11.json — the complete county roll, every parcel in Fayette County with owner of record, with a documented column schema (~20 MB)
For AI agents and LLMs: a machine-readable guide to this dataset lives at
/llms.txt and
/skill.md, with a JSON trust manifest at
/.well-known/llm-trust.json.
Frequently asked questions
Who is the largest property owner in Lexington?
By parcel count, the Lexington–Fayette Urban County Government (586 parcels, ~$318M assessed). By assessed value, the Commonwealth of Kentucky (~$1.42B, including most of the University of Kentucky campus). The largest private owner, once related LLCs are grouped, is the Ball Homes family of entities: 428 parcels worth roughly $217M.
Is this data official?
The underlying records are official (PVA, LFUCG GIS, Secretary of State). The compilation, normalization, and family groupings are this site's analysis of those records and may contain errors — see corrections below.
How often is it updated?
The current edition is a June 11, 2026 snapshot. We expect to refresh it periodically; the dateline on the map always shows the snapshot date.
Why isn't my landlord on the list?
The catalog covers owners in the top 60 by parcel count or top 60 by assessed value. An owner with, say, 30 rental houses is a major landlord but falls below this edition's cutoff. The top-500 download goes deeper.
I found an error — how do I report it?
Reach out to Paul Oliva. If a family grouping or owner total is wrong, it will be corrected and the change noted here.
Disclosure
This project was compiled programmatically — automated retrieval of public records, with AI-assisted data processing — by Paul Oliva, a local software engineer. It is a presentation of public records, not legal, financial, or title advice. Parcel data copyright rests with the public; this compilation is published in the public interest.