Accountability · The stick · Page 4 of 8
The abatement is the carrot. This page is about the properties that degrade because the owner cannot be found, and the legal pipeline that moves them back into use, where the carrot picks up.
I went in assuming the problem was out-of-state owners buying property and letting it rot. The Assessor's records say something more specific, and more useful.
| Houses, one to three family | Count | Out-of-state owner | Absentee owner | Absentee, Indiana address | Entity-owned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reinvestment tracts | 57,714 | 10.3% | 42.8% | 32.6% | 23.2% |
| Growth tracts | 114,538 | 7.0% | 24.4% | 17.4% | 15.4% |
| Strong Market tracts | 102,064 | 7.2% | 16.3% | 9.1% | 12.1% |
| Marion County | 274,320 | 7.7% | 25.2% | 17.5% | 15.8% |
Absentee means the owner's tax mailing address is not the property address. Entity-owned means the owner of record is an LLC, corporation, trust or similar. "Indiana" includes owners in Carmel or Fishers, and some out-of-state investors use a local agent's address, so out-of-state is a floor. Source: Marion County Assessor parcel layer via IndyGIS, pulled September 6, 2026, all 318,167 residential parcels.
Three different things are happening, and they need three different tools.
Problem one
Small absentee investors, mostly local
In the weakest tracts, a third of all houses are owned from an Indiana address that is not the house. The largest holders are Indianapolis LLCs with 60 to 150 houses each. This is a code-enforcement and tax-delinquency problem, and a tax on out-of-state owners would miss almost all of it.
Problem two
Institutional rental portfolios
FirstKey Homes of Atlanta, VineBrook of Ohio, American Homes 4 Rent of California and Tricon of Arizona together hold well over a thousand houses here, mostly newer ones in Growth and Strong Market tracts. This is a homeownership-access problem more than a blight problem: they buy the houses a first-time buyer would.
Problem three
Entities nobody can serve
Layered LLCs, a revoked registration, a transfer for $10 between related parties, a mailing address that belongs to someone else. The harm per property is largest here because the properties are largest: apartment complexes and commercial corners. The fix is reachability, not residency.
Vacant lots are even more local than houses. Of 19,291 vacant platted lots, 5.1% have an out-of-state owner. In Reinvestment tracts the largest lot holders are two individuals, a few local LLCs, Habitat for Humanity, and the city's own Department of Metropolitan Development. The map now lets you color every tract by absentee, entity or out-of-state share and see the largest entity owner in it.
Both are on the east side. Both are held by out-of-state entities. In both, the people responsible for enforcement cannot reach a human being who answers for the property. Nothing below is an accusation; it is what the public record shows.
A former medical office building assessed at $569,000. In May 2025 an Ohio corporation whose Indiana registration had been revoked two and a half years earlier conveyed it, for a stated ten dollars, to an individual whose mailing address on the deed is a Cleveland house owned by an unrelated third party. The same buyer received a vacant lot on Carson Avenue the same afternoon, in the same recording batch, from a different company, also for ten dollars. One email address appears as the preparer, the seller and the buyer contact on the sales disclosure. Health department notices since then go to the Cleveland address.
354 units built in 1970, sold by its Southfield, Michigan operator in October 2021, and titled today to two LLCs with a Southfield mailing address and about $12 million in combined assessed value. In the fall of 2025 the Town of Cumberland documented more than 400 code and health violations, black mold, standing water in vacant units, exposed electrical equipment. The on-site manager told a reporter that the New York man on the property records is not the owner. Cumberland passed a public-safety nuisance ordinance on October 1, 2025 because it had no other way to hold anyone responsible. (WRTV reporting, October and November 2025; Marion County Assessor records; RESSCO sale notice.)
Indiana already gives the city and county the tools to move a neglected property away from an owner who will not answer. They run on two separate tracks, and both end in the same place: a new owner, a nonprofit receiver, or the land bank. That is where the abatement picks up.
After an unsafe-building order is ignored, the city goes to court. The court may appoint a receiver to take possession, collect the rents, and use them to make the repairs the order requires. The receiver can be a nonprofit housing corporation. Where the property is both unsafe and abandoned, the receiver may sell it outright.
This is the track for Knoll Ridge. It does not depend on finding the owner. It depends on the city filing.
IC 36-7-9-17 (court action), 36-7-9-20 (receiver), 36-7-9-20.5 (sale of unsafe and abandoned property).
Once a court or hearing authority has determined a property is vacant or abandoned, the county executive may certify it to the Auditor's vacant-and-abandoned list. Property sold from that list carries no right of redemption: the buyer takes fee simple at once instead of waiting a year for the former owner to reappear. What does not sell passes to the county and from there to the land bank.
This is the track for most small absentee holdings and for the lots on Carson Avenue.
IC 6-1.1-24-1.5 (the list), 6-1.1-25-4 (no redemption).
Section citations above were checked against the current Indiana Code in September 2026 but not against Corporation Counsel's reading of them. Two things I do not yet know: whether Marion County currently certifies a vacant-and-abandoned list each year and how many parcels are on it, and how many receiverships the city has actually sought under the Unsafe Building Law in the last five years. Both numbers decide whether this pipeline exists in practice or only on paper.
None of this needs a new tax, and none of it depends on where the owner lives.
Local · budget
Receivership capacity
Receivers do not appear on their own. Fund a nonprofit receiver, the way the statute contemplates, and give Corporation Counsel the staff to file. A receivership program with ten cases a year would change the calculation for every unreachable owner in the county.
Local · administrative
Certify the list, every year
The vacant-and-abandoned list is a county executive action with a statutory deadline each spring. Make it routine, publish it, and feed it to the land bank.
Local · ordinance
A nuisance ordinance with teeth
Cumberland wrote one in a month. Indianapolis should have one that lets the city recover its enforcement costs as a lien and treats repeated failure to respond as the nuisance itself.
Local · administrative
Match the records
The Recorder, Auditor and Secretary of State each hold one piece of the 16th and Ritter pattern. A nominal-consideration transfer from an entity not in good standing should be flagged at the counter, not discovered a year later by a councilor with a spreadsheet.
Local · registration
A person who can be served
State law caps the rental registration fee at five dollars and requires updated information within thirty days of a sale. It does not stop the city from asking for a responsible local contact on the form. Whether it can require one is a question for Corporation Counsel.
State
Good standing to hold rentals
The narrow Statehouse ask: an entity that holds residential rental property in Indiana must keep a registered agent in good standing, and a deed from an entity that is not may not be recorded until it is. The Attorney General has already gone after at least one apartment owner over conditions; the tools exist to be used.
It is not a tax on out-of-state owners. Out-of-state entities hold 7.7% of the county's houses and 5.1% of its vacant lots. A surtax aimed at them would miss the local absentee owners who hold four times as much, would run into the Commerce Clause, and would need taxing authority the city does not have. Aim at reachability and the geography takes care of itself.
What this means for you
Pick who you are in the bar at the top and this section changes.
Track B is where your next lots come from. Properties sold from the vacant-and-abandoned list come with clean fee simple title on day one, and if they sit in a Reinvestment tract, the house you build on them carries the abatement. Tell me whether you would bid on that list if it were published and predictable.
Absentee-owned houses in the weakest tracts are the ones that come to market in the worst condition, or never. If you have seen the 16th and Ritter pattern, a nominal transfer, an address that does not match, a seller nobody can reach, at a closing table, I want to hear about it.
Receivership properties and land-bank lots are the infill sites this program is built around: older platted lots, existing foundations, sometimes a shell worth saving. A rehab standard that a nonprofit receiver can actually execute on a $150,000 budget is worth more here than a new-build prototype.
A property coming out of receivership or off the vacant-and-abandoned list has a title history that will make an underwriter nervous. What does it take for you to lend on one, and does a title company's certification of the tax deed suffice?
The statute names you: a receiver may be a nonprofit corporation whose primary purpose is improving housing conditions in the county. If the city funded a receivership program, would you be the receiver, and what would it cost you per case?
If there is a property on your block that has been ignored for years and nobody can find the owner, that is exactly the profile this page is about. Send the address. The pipeline above only moves when someone files, and filing starts with a list.
Everything in the 'what we can decide ourselves' band is budget or administration. The two numbers I need from the administration before the next budget hearing: how many receiverships the city has sought in five years, and how many parcels were on the last vacant-and-abandoned list. If both answers are near zero, that is the finding.