Friday, July 10, 2015

Apps In GIS: Participation & County Appraising

Welcome to my participatory assignment overview for Application in GIS, focusing on some aspects of the wonderful information provided by county appraisers. Here We will look at some variations of information provided by my local county appraiser for Santa Rosa County Florida. Then we will look at some of the unique tasks that county appraisers often find themselves doing in the realm of GIS. Below I will reference some specific questions that guided the exploration of my county appraisers services.

1. Does your property appraiser offer a web mapping site?

Yes, the county appraisers website is linked in with the county main webpage which has a dedicated GIS map. The county appraisers features on the map offer parcel look up, sale information, tax information, and many other features.

County Appraisers website: http://www.srcpa.org/index.html
County GIS Home Site: http://www.santarosa.fl.gov/gis/#
Good link to the appraisal map services can be found here.

One of the handy features associated with all the information provided is the ability to look up recent or historical sale date. The following question and answer are based off of the searching the month of June '15 for the highest selling property.

2. What was the selling price of this property? What was the previous selling price if applicable. (Screenshot seen below)

The property sold for $705,000, with the previous sale being $940,000 about 11 years earlier.

You can already see the answer to this next question on the image above, however with the screenshot below you can see that there are more than just a current look at property value, you can see a more in depth view elsewhere in the appraisers data.

3. What is the assessed land value? Based on land record data is the assessed land value higher or lower than the last sale price?

The land value for this last year is $219,672 with a total assessed property value of $429,753. This is significantly lower than the overall sale price, though you can see from the last three years trend data the value is rising.

4. share some additional information about this piece of land that you find interesting.
The most interesting thing I found from reviewing these files came from the deed history. Not only are the deeds for this and past sales available electronically, they also paint an interesting picture. So the sale before the most recent one is listed as $940,000 dollars. Upon reviewing the deed for it, the house was given as an inheritance from a trust for the price of $10 (yes 10 dollars). Looking at this, seeing that the family who inherited it turned it into 700K profit is really quite amazing. Wish that we all were so lucky. At any rate, you can paint an interesting picture about a piece of land from its property appraisal history.

 The next portion of this assignment revolved around taking a neighborhood subdivision and mapping its relative land values. One purpose for this is to compare the highs and lows and evaluate trends generated in the appraisals done by the county appraisers office. You can spatially analyze the data to see if it is similar or if there are outliers than need to be investigated. The overall concept is that properties that are similar in size, composition, and improvement should be similar in price. So looking at a map that contains a few outliers such as the one in red or those in blue, should given enough reason to at least ask, why are they much higher or lower. This gives a place to look to ensure that the proper appraising has been done.



This is a fairly simple map representing the depicted subdivision. The parcels for the subdivision have been symbolized by parcel land value. We can see that the vast majority fall between 24-27 thousand. There is only one property significantly higher, and five significantly lower. I will utilize these potential outliers to answer the final question below.

5. Which accounts do you think need review based on land value and information learned during this assessment. The following parcels might warrant investigation:
Folio # 090310165 depicted centrally in red
Folio # 090310410 depicted in light green to the north west
Folio # 090310420 depicted in light blue to the north west
Folio # 090310421 depicted north western bright blue
Folio # 090310422 smallest depicted parcel in bright blue
Folio # 090310421 depicted south easternmost parcel in bright blue.

First lets look at the significantly higher value home. It is only assessed approximately 6K higher, this is not too significant, but is the only home in the area when conditions are otherwise the same to be so. What we cant see with this look is if significant property improvements have been made beyond the other parcels in the subdivision which could account for this increase. This is why it is worth at least validating.
Next I will discuss the 5 lower value parcels together, then talk about a couple anomalies to them independently. With the exception of the light green parcel at 10K, the other 4 blue parcels are all incredibly low, and my first impression is that these are likely undeveloped parcels in the neighborhood. Without an improved lot the value would be depicted lower. The is if the land value takes improvement into account. Otherwise it would be worth investigating why plots that are significantly larger than many of the parcels in the neighborhood and one significantly smaller are in fact less valued.
Look at the two large bright blue parcels and note that they both have the same reference number. There are a number of different thoughts that come to mind when looking at this both graphically above, and in the attribute table which I have not provided. These two parcels could be owned by the same owner, perhaps the original developer of the subdivision. They also could both likely be undeveloped which could account for the low value. Or there could be an error in the parcel database, in which case you would want to validate if they in fact need separate reference numbers and different data than is present.
In general, the outliers in these cases make prime examples of records that should be cross checked for accuracy. Its not a bad idea considering there are 65 total parcels and we have identified 6 to at least do a more thorough cross check (roughly 9% of total parcels) on. Likely not all of these are off from what they need to be, but there are some that likely would have some sort of change. These kinds of referencing and cross referencing and map creating are just some aspects of GIS work in association with county level GIS tax work. It has definitely been eye opening to look at all the information even about your own home that is right there at your countys website fingertips. Thank you.

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