Creating Locator with Parcel data

[SarahHurley1]

I am creating a locator in ArcGIS Pro using a parcel dataset. The parcel dataset has an address field and a town field. I am able to successfully create the locator using these fields (field mapping is Parcel Name = parcel address field and City = parcel town field). When I test the locator, it only matches about 50% of the locations, and the other 50% is unmatched. When I go through the unmatched fields, they are addresses/towns that are in the parcel dataset (exactly the same or nearly exact), so they should be matching. Also when I try to "Rematch Addresses", for all the unmatched fields it says "No candidates found" - when there should be at least some very similar addresses they should be candidates.

I can't figure out why this is happening, or what to adjust to make the matches work. I've tried to change the Geocoding options > Match options > Match with no zone > Yes; but that didn't seem to make much of a difference. Any suggestions? 

[jcarlson]

I would start by looking at the unmatched features individually and see if you can actually find a matching address in the parcel layer yourself.

Try to see if there are any common features with the unmatched features. Do they abbreviate or spell out things differently from your parcels layer? Do the addresses actually exist in the parcel layer?

[SarahHurley1]

Thanks for the reply. That's why I'm confused; the unmatched addresses do have exact matches in the parcel layer. 

[ShanaBritt · Accepted solution]

@SarahHurley1 The issue is with how the locator is created. Is the purpose of the locator to search for an address such as '380 New York St, Redlands, Ca' or to search for the parcel ID? The Parcel role is designed to search the parcel ID (APN, PIN), parcel ID + address or just the address of the parcel. If the value in the parcel address field is '380 New York St' in your data you will want o use that field as the input field in the Split Address Into Components tool. Then use the output as input to the Create Locator tool. If you do not have a parcel ID in this data, after using the Split Address Into Components tool, the output can be  used to create a locator with the PointAddress role.

[SarahHurley1]

Thanks for the reply!

My goal is to use an address points layer + the state parcel layer to create a locator. But I noticed that the parcel data was not geocoding properly so I was focused on solving that. 

If I want to create a locator with both the address point data + the parcel data, would it make most sense to convert the parcels to a centroid point layer and combine the two datasets? I am not planning on using the parcel ID, I am just interested in the address and the location of the parcels to fill in gaps for where the addresses are missing from the first address points layer. I do worry about duplications though with this methods, since we do not have a unique ID for each location. 

[ShanaBritt]

You do run into duplicating data and would want to have IDs for the duplicates to collapse them as described in the following topic, https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/data/geocoding/collapse-duplicate-features-in-the-data.... The other option is to create a PointAddress role locator with the address point layer and a PointAddress role locator with the state polygon parcel layer and then combine them in a composite locator. If the address point layer has the parcel ID you could set that as a custom output field, the same for the parcel based locator, then when  you geocode the result will have the parcel id in one of the output fields.