Acres: Land Data & Parcel Maps

Review by eFreeware

If you own rural land, manage it for someone else, or sell it for a living, the moment you most need parcel information is usually the moment you are standing on the property with a phone in your hand. Acres is built for exactly that situation. It puts property boundaries, land data and for-sale listings into a single mobile app, so a field visit does not have to wait until you are back at a desk.

The developer's pitch is aimed at landowners, farm managers and land real estate professionals, and that framing feels right. This is not a casual app for browsing pretty aerial photos. It is a working tool for people who need to confirm where a line falls, what the soil is like, or what a neighboring parcel last sold for, and who want to do it without carrying a folder of printouts.

It is free to download and carries no ads, though some features sit behind an Acres+ upgrade. With more than 500,000 installs and a 3.9 average from roughly 2,690 ratings, it has clearly found an audience among people who work with land. The app arrived in September 2022 and was last updated in September 2026, so it is being kept current rather than left to sit.

Built for people who work the land, not just browse it

The clearest fit is anyone whose job or hobby involves decisions about specific parcels. A farm manager checking whether a field's soil composition matches what the seed rep promised. A land agent walking a listing with a client and wanting to show the boundary without unfolding a plat map. A landowner trying to settle a fence-line question with a neighbor before it becomes a surveyor's bill.

Small-scale farmers evaluating a lease, hunters and recreational buyers assessing a tract, and rural property investors comparing candidate parcels all fall into the same group. The common thread is that they need parcel-level facts, not general regional averages. Acres is organized around selecting a parcel and reading its data, which is the right shape for that work.

If your interest in land is mostly aesthetic, or you only need a map to get from one place to another, this is heavier machinery than the task requires. The app assumes you care about ownership, boundaries and agricultural characteristics. That assumption runs through everything it does.

Boundaries and ownership, on location

The core of the app is parcel lookup. You can browse millions of US parcels, select one, and see its property lines drawn on the map. For anyone who has stood at a corner marker wondering whether the fence is three feet or thirty feet off, having the boundary rendered on screen is the whole point of carrying the app.

Owner names sit behind the Acres+ upgrade rather than in the free tier. That is a meaningful split, because ownership is often the first thing people want to know when they are looking at a parcel from the road. The app tells you where the lines are; the paid tier tells you who holds title.

Around that core, the app is designed for use in the field rather than at a desk. You can save parcels so you can pull them up again later, share maps and land data out of the app, and share your location so the data for wherever you are standing comes up directly. Offline maps can be downloaded, and you can drop a pin and send your position to someone else. For rural areas where signal is patchy, that combination is the difference between a tool that works and one that just shows a spinner.

The data layers that do the real work

Beyond boundaries, Acres pulls together a set of layers that answer practical questions about a piece of ground. Soil maps show composition and quality, which matters for anyone thinking about what will grow there. Elevation gives you the range across a parcel, useful for drainage questions and for understanding why one corner of a field always floods.

The vegetation index reads plant health from light reflection, and crop history shows annual crop coverage drawn from satellite imagery. Together these two let you see not just what is planted now but what has been planted over time, and whether the crop in a given field looks healthy compared with its neighbors. For a farm manager reviewing a lease or a buyer evaluating a tract, that history is often more revealing than a single season's snapshot.

Then there are the economic layers. County rent offers estimates for cash rental rates on cropland and pastureland, while county yield draws on farmer-reported survey data for expected annual crop yields. Property tax figures are included where available. These are the numbers that turn a parcel from an interesting piece of ground into a business case, and having them alongside the soil and elevation data means you can build a rough picture of a property in one sitting.

The app also includes a search for land for sale across the US, and listings can be shared. That rounds out the workflow: research a parcel, check comparable listings, and send what you found to a client or partner without leaving the app. Seven filters, among them soil maps, elevation and crop history, let you narrow that search rather than scrolling through everything.

What it costs, and what the upgrade covers

Acres is free to download and shows no ads, which is unusual for a data-heavy app of this type. The developer monetizes through in-app purchases instead, and the one described in any detail is Acres+, which unlocks landowner names. That is the clearest line between what you get at no cost and what you pay for.

The rest of the data layers, the parcel search, saved parcels, sharing and offline maps are presented as part of the app rather than as paid extras, though the presence of in-app purchases means there may be more to the paid tier than the owner-name feature alone. Anyone whose work depends on identifying owners should treat the upgrade as part of the cost of using the app seriously.

The trade-off is straightforward. You can do a great deal of land research without spending anything, and you will not be interrupted by advertising while you do it. If ownership lookup is central to your workflow, the free version will feel like it stops one step short of the answer you need.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious comparison is with county GIS websites and assessor portals. Those are free and authoritative, but they are built for a desktop browser, they vary wildly from county to county, and they are not much use when you are standing on a dirt road with one bar of signal. Acres trades some of that local specificity for consistency and mobility.

Professional mapping and GIS software sits at the other end. It offers far deeper analysis, but it comes with desktop workflows, licensing costs and a learning curve that most landowners and small farm operators have no reason to climb. Acres occupies the middle ground: more portable than a county portal, less demanding than full GIS.

Dedicated land-listing marketplaces are another point of comparison, but they are built around transactions rather than research. Acres combines listing search with parcel data, soil, elevation and crop history, so a buyer can judge a property and see what else is for sale without switching tools. That combination is the app's main argument for itself.

A worthwhile field companion for land professionals

Acres does one job well: it puts parcel-level land data in your hand while you are out looking at land. Property lines, soil, elevation, vegetation, crop history, county rent and yield, and property tax figures are the kinds of facts that normally require a trip back to the office, and having them on a phone changes how a site visit runs. The no-ads, free-to-download model makes it easy to try on a single property before deciding whether it belongs in your regular kit.

Owner names require the Acres+ upgrade, so if identifying landowners is the main reason you would install it, budget for that from the start.

My recommendation is for landowners, farm managers, land agents and rural investors who regularly need to check boundaries and evaluate ground in person. If that describes your work, Acres is a sensible addition to the phone. If you only need occasional map browsing, the free tier will still do more than you require, and there is no harm in that.

What's new in version 3.6.2

Bug fixes and improvements.