Who Owns Cochise County's Vacant Land: 56,925 Parcels, Counted

Cochise County has 122,965 parcels on the Assessor's roll. 56,925 of them are vacant land in private hands, and on 26 October 2026 we pulled every one of them from the county's open ArcGIS services and joined each parcel to its owner's mailing state, its zoning district, its distance to a county-maintained road, the nearest registered well, and the FEMA flood layer. This article is the ownership half of what came out. The tax-lien half is here.

"Vacant" here means the Assessor's use code starts with 00. State Trust land (2,887 parcels) is excluded. "Out of state" means the tax bill goes to an address outside Arizona, which is the only ownership geography the county publishes.

More than half of it is owned from somewhere else

Of the 54,958 vacant parcels with a known mailing state, 55.1 percent are addressed outside Arizona. Count the 1,967 parcels with an unknown or foreign address as absentee too, which they are in practice, and the figure is 56.6 percent. Of the Arizona-addressed parcels, 13,790 are mailed to a city outside Cochise County, mostly Tucson and Phoenix. Put the two together and roughly four out of five vacant lots in this county are owned by someone who does not live here.

Hawaii at 949 parcels is not a typo. Two Honolulu-addressed companies, Camino Real Land Corp (532 parcels) and Appreciating Assets Inc (79), hold most of it, and the pattern repeats down the entity list: Evergreen Team Holdings LLC in South Dakota holds 336 parcels, and a string of Pioneer Title Agency and Landmark Title trusts hold several hundred more on behalf of beneficiaries the public record does not name. These are the people who bought subdivision lots by the hundred.

They are the exception. 72.4 percent of owner names are individuals, 27.6 percent entities, and we count any name with LLC, trust, trustee or similar tokens as an entity, so the individual share is if anything understated. The typical absentee owner is one person in Fresno or Columbus with one lot they inherited or bought from a magazine advertisement.

What the lots look like

Small. The median vacant parcel is 0.86 acres, and the median full cash value on the Assessor's roll is $2,500, or about $2,153 an acre.

Three quarters of the county's vacant parcels are under two and a half acres. If you came here expecting to find a forty, there are 1,964 parcels over 40 acres; 1,712 of them are zoned RU-4, about half are entity-owned (ranches, mining companies, the electric cooperative) and only 38 percent have an out-of-state address.

Seventy-one percent is "vacant residential, rural subdivided"

Use code 0013 covers 40,302 of the 56,925 parcels. It is the Assessor's label for a residential lot in a recorded subdivision outside any town, and almost all of it is the paper subdivisions of the 1960s and 1970s, Arizona Sunsites around Pearce being the best known, with others scattered across the Sulphur Springs and San Pedro valleys. Developers platted thousands of half-acre and one-acre lots, recorded the plat, graded a few roads, and sold the lots by mail to people who had never seen them. Many of those "roads" were never built, and the ones that were are not county-maintained. We wrote up what that does to access in the paper-roads article.

Use code 0013 is also where the absentee ownership concentrates: 66 percent of these lots have an out-of-state tax address, against 55 percent for vacant land as a whole.

Zoning, and what the codes mean for a buyer

Zoning tells you what you can build and how small a lot can be. The county's codes are terse, so here is the decoder, with the ownership and value figures from the pack beside each.

RU is Rural. The number is the minimum lot in acres: RU-4 is four acres, RU-2 is two, RU-36 is thirty-six. About 90 percent of unincorporated Cochise County is RU. RU-4 matters more than any other district on this list because it is the floor for the owner-builder opt-out, and because the county's RU table permits all single and multiple household dwelling types, manufactured homes included. It is also the cheapest ground per acre here and the least absentee-owned, which tells you something: the people who own four-acre parcels tend to be the people who use them.

SR is Single-Household Residential. The number is the minimum lot size in thousands of square feet where it is under an acre (SR-22 is 22,000 ft², about half an acre; SR-12 and SR-8 are town-sized lots), and SR-43 is a one-acre district, 43,560 ft². The important part is in the permitted uses: SR districts allow single-household dwellings and exclude mobile and manufactured homes. If your plan is a manufactured home on a cheap SR-22 lot near Sunsites, the zoning says no before you have looked at anything else. These four SR districts hold 26,037 parcels and carry the highest out-of-state shares in the county, 58 to 73 percent.

R is Residential: all single and multiple household dwellings, manufactured homes included, with the number again in thousands of square feet (R-36, R-18, R-9). R-36 is also mostly old subdivision, but the median parcel is 2.36 acres because many were sold as double or quadruple lots.

MH-72 is on 2,144 parcels in the GIS layer but not on the county's current Summary of Zoning Districts page. It is a legacy manufactured-home designation; confirm permitted uses with Development Services (520-432-9300) before relying on it.

City names are a limitation of the data, not a district. The county layer stops at town limits, so 2,262 Willcox parcels and 1,375 Benson parcels show the city name and nothing more. Benson's $13,636 an acre and 13 percent absentee share are what in-town lots look like. Willcox's 0.23-acre median and 60 percent absentee share are the old townsite plats on the playa, and 96 percent of those parcels are in a FEMA flood zone.

Why absentee ownership matters

If you are buying, it explains the market. An owner in Illinois who has paid $40 a year in tax on a lot since 1974 and has never seen it is a motivated seller, and the pack's lien layer says 10,975 of them have stopped paying. It also explains why neighbouring lots sit empty: there is no one to clear the brush, grade the road or object to anything. A subdivision that is 73 percent absentee-owned will stay quiet for decades, which is either the point or the problem depending on what you want.

If you are selling, it tells you who your competition is. Thousands of near-identical lots in the same plat, owned by people who would take almost anything to be rid of the tax bill, cap what any one is worth. The Assessor's median of $2,500 is not a low-ball; it is the market.

And if you own one, absentee ownership is what makes vacant-land deed fraud work: nobody checks on the lot, and the mailing address on the roll is public.

What this data cannot tell you

• Where the owner lives. It is a tax-bill address. A Tucson PO box can belong to a Pearce rancher.
• Who is behind a trust. Title-agency trust numbers hide the beneficiary by design; several hundred lots fall in this bucket.
• Whether the lot is buildable. Zoning says nothing about legal access, a perc test, a well or a floodplain use permit, and 28 percent of these parcels touch a flood zone.
• City zoning. Parcels inside the seven incorporated towns show the city name only.
• Current title. The GIS updates weekly and lags recorded deeds. Confirm on the Treasurer's Parcel Inquiry site and with the Recorder.

The short version

• 56,925 vacant parcels; 55 percent owned from out of state, nearly 80 percent owned from outside the county.
• Median lot 0.86 acres, median value $2,500. Three quarters are under 2.5 acres.
• 71 percent are 1960s–70s subdivision lots (use code 0013), and those are two-thirds absentee-owned.
• RU-4 is the four-acre rural district and the cheapest per acre; SR districts (22,000 ft² to 1 acre) exclude manufactured homes; R districts allow them.
• Check zoning, access and flood status on the specific APN before anything else. The district code alone does not make a lot usable.