Using technology to assess property

The folks over at Talking Taxes, a great blog run by the Citizens for Tax Justice, picked up on a New York Times article about the City of Philadelphia’s use of a company called Pictometry to assess property from the air. This firm can compare old photos of a property with new ones to direct assessors' attention to improvements and new construction without leaving the office. Here is a snippet from the NYT article:

"Scott Yamamoto, the property appraiser for Geauga County, Ohio, which is east of Cleveland, also uses the change-detection feature. The computer, he said, is programmed to look for “something that wasn’t there before, or something that was there before but isn’t there now.”

“We get a list, in spreadsheet form, of all the parcels where there was some type of change,” he said.

Unfortunately, he said, there are a lot of false positives. A pile of sand, or snow on the ground, can trigger the change detector. “Or a boat parked close to a garage can look to the computer like the garage has been expanded,” he said.

But Mr. Yamamoto is not complaining. The first time his office used the change-detection feature, he said, his office “picked up about $1.8 million in property value that we could not see from the ground.”

That translated into $35,000 in tax revenue last year for his rural county."

Click here to read the full article. The blog post on this article at Talking Taxes here provides a link to the webpage of Lee County, FL which allows anyone (after registration) to view the Pictometry data.

On a somewhat related note, Indiana has been developing some cutting-edge GIS technology in the past few years, and I highly recommend you check out the webpage of the state's Geographic Information Council (IGIC) here. We would love to hear if readers know of any Indiana counties using aerial maps or GIS for property assessment. There may be some initial costs to taxpayers, but the benefit of a broader, more accurate tax base probably outweighs the cost in the long run.