Participation Assignment - GIS for Local Government

The first portion of this assignment provided an overview of how to perform property research within your local area.  This also provided insight into how said government maintains the land record data.  We were tasked with the following:

1. Conduct a web search to locate a property appraiser’s office in your area.

Q1:  Does your property appraiser offer a web mapping site? If so, what is the web

address? If not, what is the method in which you may obtain the data?  Martin County has both a GIS site and a separate appraisers site both.  Appraiser site: https://pa.martin.fl.us/tools/property-map-searches , http://geoweb.martin.fl.us/general/.

2. Most property appraiser’s websites offer a list of recent property sales by month. Search for the month of June for the current year and locate the highest property sold.

Q2:  What was the selling price of this property? What was the previous selling price of this property (if applicable)?   Take a screen shot of the description provided to include with this answer.

The highest selling price was $210,000.00.  The previous selling price was $93,000.00

3. The selling price and assessed price will differ in most cases (higher or lower). You may choose to search for a different property based on location/owner name or use the same result from the previous question to answer the following questions.

Q3:  What is the assessed land value?  Based on land record data, is the assessed land value higher or lower than the last sale price?  Include a screen shot.  The assessed land value is $72,000.  The assessed land value is lower than the last sale price.

Q4:  Share additional information about this piece of land that you find interesting.  Many times, a link to the deed will be available providing more insight to the sale.  If you look at the assessment and exemptions information for this parcel, you will note the drastic jump in land value during 2006-2007.  This was when the Florida real estate market was extremely over inflated which led to the subsequent economic downturn affecting property owners, home buyers, developers, surveyors, engineers and the like.  Values have begun to increase in the last two years and will hopefully return to a more normal level.  This is also evident by looking at the land value from the past two years.  The Warranty Deed for this property is recorded in Official Record Book 2858, Page 1546.-

Part two of this lab focused on understanding and mapping assessed values.  For ethical, political and legal reasons, such assessments must be performed equitably.  Items affecting value include lot size, improvement size, age, condition, location, proximity to waterfront and land use.  Within these areas there is usually a diverse mix of land values between neighboring parcels due to various combinations such as mixed zoning, varying home values, and homes ranging greatly between age.  More uniform areas typically have more uniform values as can be seen in subdivisions.  Our job was to review West Ridge Place subdivision and determine if there were any accounts which needed to be reviewed in order to maintain fair and equitable assessments.  Here is the resulting map created for analysis purposes:

Q5.  Which accounts do you think need review based on land value and what you’ve learned about assessment?  

Based on the graphic analysis, there are seven parcels which I would review.  Parcel 090310165 stands out as it has one of the highest values.  Parcels 090310175, 090310320, 090310325, 090310260 and 090310245 have slightly lower values than the majority of the adjacent properties.  Parcel 090310105 has a lower value than the adjacent properties.