Three Ownership Conditions, Three Intervention Starting Points
How ownership evidence connects communities to the services each property may need
Abstract
Project Guardian separates three screened ownership conditions: unresolved estate, multiple owners, and at risk. Each condition represents a different intervention starting point. This paper compares current examples from Duval County, Florida; Camden County, New Jersey; Jefferson County, Kentucky; and Jefferson County, Arkansas. The county category mixes differ sharply. Camden's corrected exclusive analysis also shows that unresolved-estate concentration falls across tract income quintiles, identifying a clear service-placement question. Jefferson County's death-record screening shows how additional evidence can redirect a property from preventive outreach to probable unresolved-estate review. Together, the findings demonstrate the framework's practical value: communities can estimate the capacity they need, place services where screened need is concentrated, and update the intervention queue as stronger evidence becomes available.
1. The three conditions
| Screened condition | What the record suggests | Intervention starting point | Still requires validation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unresolved estate | A prior owner appears deceased and the ownership record has not been resolved into a current, stable form. | Estate resolution, heir identification, probate navigation, title clearing, urgent loss prevention when needed. | Death, legal heirs, probate status, occupancy, liens, and the family's goals. |
| Multiple owners | The current record shows several owners or a compressed multiple-owner signal such as Et al. | Owner identification, family engagement, governance, mediation, partition prevention, title review. | Whether owners are relatives, whether the record is complete, each person's interest, occupancy, and conflict. |
| At risk | The record names an individual owner and meets the preventive screen through long tenure or a qualifying combination of tenure and property-record signals. | Wills, estate planning, beneficiary or deed review where appropriate, homestead review, preventive outreach. | Whether the named owner is living, current owner identity, household goals, existing estate documents, eligibility, and legal advice. |
Table 1. Three screened ownership conditions and where each one leads.
2. The mix changes by county
| County | Eligible denominator | Total screened | Unresolved | Multiple owners | At risk | Screened prevalence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duval, FL | 268,304 | 32,670 | 3,585 | 26,640 | 2,445 | 12.18% |
| Camden, NJ | 144,315 | 4,511 | 950 | 293 | 3,268 | 3.13% |
| Jefferson, KY | 229,804 | 8,600 | 1,285 | 367 | 6,948 | 3.74% |
| Jefferson, AR | 39,203 | 3,859 | 17 | 2,398 | 1,444 | 9.84% |
Figure 1. Category mix in four current Project Guardian county examples. Compares program composition, not definitive prevalence across counties.
Duval's screening is dominated by multiple-owner records. Jefferson County, Kentucky is dominated by the at-risk condition. Camden's corrected exclusive hierarchy also produces a large at-risk group, while the older tract-fingerprint file used a different, nonexclusive construction and must be kept separate. Jefferson County, Arkansas contains a large multiple-owner group and a substantial at-risk group. These mixes imply different staffing, legal partnerships, outreach messages, and time horizons.
3. Unresolved-estate concentration changes across income quintiles
In Camden County's corrected exclusive tract analysis, unresolved-estate concentration falls sharply across income quintiles. The lowest-income quintile contains 500 unresolved-estate records among 18,086 eligible residential-family parcels, or 27.6 per 1,000. The highest-income quintile contains 13 among 35,577 parcels, or 0.4 per 1,000. Using the unrounded rates, the lowest-income rate is about 76 times the highest-income rate.
Figure 2. Dominant unresolved-estate records per 1,000 eligible residential-family parcels across Camden County tract income quintiles. Source: Project Guardian corrected exclusive income-quintile summary.
The intermediate quintiles step down from 8.4 to 3.8 to 2.8 unresolved-estate records per 1,000. The pattern identifies where affordable probate, title-clearing, document retrieval, and heir-identification capacity may be most needed. It supports targeted county validation, outreach, and service placement. The analysis describes a tract-level association. It does not show that income caused an ownership condition or determine the circumstances of an individual family.
4. County findings that lead directly to action
| Place | Evidence | Program question |
|---|---|---|
| Duval County, FL | 26,640 of 32,670 screened parcels are in the multiple-owner condition in the 12 August 2026 county summary. | How much owner identification, family engagement, mediation, and partition-prevention capacity is available at neighborhood scale? |
| Jefferson County, KY | Of 11,018 owner records submitted from the 6,948-property at-risk cohort, 1,144 (10.4%) matched as deceased. On 169 properties, every submitted owner matched as deceased. | How quickly can the 169 properties be validated against county title and probate records and connected to estate-resolution support? |
| Jefferson County, AR | 2,277 screened parcels are vacant. Of those, 368 are in the mapped 1% annual-chance flood area. | Which vacant properties need title work, hazard review, stabilization, or acquisition support first? |
5. Et al is a finding
Et al is an ownership finding. It tells us that the displayed ownership record includes other people whose names are not shown. The phrase supplies multiple-owner evidence and also identifies a practical limit: outreach cannot begin responsibly until the other owners are identified. At scale, Et al helps quantify the need for owner research and supports an owner-identification step before family engagement, mediation, partition prevention, or legal work.
6. Limitations
- Project Guardian national county summaries, algorithm v4, 12 August 2026: Duval County, Florida and Jefferson County, Kentucky.
- Project Guardian Camden County corrected exclusive dominant-category pipeline and Phase 1 residential denominator files.
- Project Guardian Jefferson County, Arkansas 2026 Regrid-only screening summary, FEMA flood overlap, and Pine Bluff ward summaries.
- Project Guardian Camden County corrected exclusive income-quintile summary and Phase 1 eligible residential-family parcel denominators, used for the unresolved-estate concentration figure.
- Project Guardian, Jefferson County, Kentucky at-risk cohort death-record reconciliation, 1 September 2026: 11,018 submitted owner records and 169 strict probable unresolved-estate-review properties.
- Regrid national parcel data and local county assessor and property records, used for ownership, tenure, and property-value signals.
- U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey and Decennial Census, used for household income and tract-level context.
These are working papers based on Project Guardian analysis files. Counts may change when source files are refreshed, county records are added, or screening rules are revised. Every public release should carry the source date, denominator, geography, and method version.