Homes by Build Year

What this map shows

Each home is placed at the location recorded in the MLS and colored by its original year built as reported in that record. Repeated sales of the same address are merged into one entry; where a home's reported year built differs across sales by more than two years, it is shown as unverified rather than guessed.

Original year built is kept separate from renovations, additions, and any "effective age" figure. None of those are in this dataset, so the map does not show them.

Why build year helps

Construction era is a quick way to find the kind of home you are picturing: pre-war bungalows near downtown, mid-century ranches in the north, split-levels from the 1970s, or the newest subdivisions on the south and west edges. It also helps sellers see how their home sits among its neighbors before pricing.

Age is not condition

A 1920 home may have a new roof, wiring, and windows; a 2005 home may not. Build year says when a home was first constructed and nothing else. This map makes no claim about safety, efficiency, defects, or value.

Coverage, sources, and limits

• Source: closed residential sales in the Fargo-Moorhead MLS (FMAAR) plus an earlier archive, held in the Elm data warehouse (elm.sales). Records span Jan 1996 to 4 Aug 2026. Build year is what the listing agent entered; it is not verified against county assessor records.
• Counts: Fargo 44,182 closed-sale records became 25,404 address entries (273 unverified years); West Fargo 9,395 entries; Moorhead 9,681; Horace 1,352. Records without usable coordinates were left out (62 in Fargo).
• Grand Forks and East Grand Forks: our MLS records there carry no coordinates, so each address was placed with the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder (Public_AR_Current benchmark, run 9 Sep 2026). Of 12,627 addresses, 11,955 were placed (9,330 exact, 2,625 normalized spellings), 405 were not found, 199 matched a different street or house number and were dropped, and 68 rural-route or box addresses were not submitted. Census places a home along its street segment, so a dot can sit a few lots from the true parcel; cells absorb most of that.
• Not included: homes with no MLS sale since 1996, new homes not yet sold, and rental-only buildings. Coverage is strongest where resale activity is steady.
• Boundaries: the city is the one recorded on the listing, not the municipal boundary. Fargo neighborhood outlines are the polygons behind our existing neighborhood saved searches (32 harvested 8 Sep 2026; North Fargo has no polygon).
• Roads and rivers: motorways, primary and longer secondary roads plus the Red and Sheyenne rivers from OpenStreetMap, simplified to about 100 m, for the Fargo-Moorhead metro and Grand Forks (pulled 8 and 9 Sep 2026). They are for orientation; the production build uses a full basemap.
• School zones (optional overlay): outlines come from the polygons behind our existing school-zone saved searches (38 harvested 9 Sep 2026: Fargo 20, West Fargo 14, Moorhead 4; elementary and middle only). The six high-school searches (Davies, Fargo North, Fargo South, Horace, Sheyenne, West Fargo) carry no polygon, so they are not drawn. These are how our searches were drawn, not official district GIS, and districts redraw zones; confirm with the district before relying on one. Names and boundaries only; no ratings or rankings.
• Dates: "Last record" is the most recent closed sale we hold for that address. A page refresh date only says when we last rebuilt the map, not that the assessor re-checked the year.
• Homes for sale: nothing here is a listing. Search links open the live IDX search with the same area and build-year filters (city, cell, neighborhood, and school-zone link patterns verified against the live search 8 and 9 Sep 2026: for example West Fargo 102 homes for sale, 19 built 2010 to 2019; Grand Forks 128, 16 built 1960 to 1979; Kennedy Elementary zone 25, 7 built 2000 to 2009). Whether a specific home is for sale has not been checked in this prototype.

Not yet mappable