2013 Fall Newsletter

of education and networking. You won’t want to miss it!

Best wishes on a successful VAB.

Neil “Nick” Nikkinen, AAS, CFE FCIAAO President

STATEWIDE SALES DATABASE

What would it take to create and maintain a Statewide Sales Database?

Recently there have been some discussions about creating a statewide sales data- base so that FCIAAO members could research comparable sales. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to find comps for some of those hard-to-value properties? Sure, we can go to another county’s website and perform a search for sold properties within that county and, with our fingers crossed, hope that some property comes close to what we are looking for. Gee, we only have 67 counties to look through, no biggie.

Marsha Coleman, CFE

Some of our members may already know that each July our offices submit Tax Roll files to the Depart- ment of Revenue and those files are uploaded to the Department’s FTP site along with all of the sales data conveniently located in one place. But is it really that convenient? Sure, you can click on a county link, open the Excel spreadsheet and do a quick search within that county, but when you find some- thing that you may be interested in looking at further, you would then have to take that Parcel ID and go to the website for each specific county so that you can then check it out via a property record card or GIS mapping. The Florida Chapter provides links to each county on the website for quick and easy ac- cess to the 67 Counties, which is sure to save you some time. So, while all of the submitted sales infor- mation is right there under those links, the process for finding a comp will be time-consuming to say the least. GIS mapping, mentioned earlier, has become such an important tool of many offices and is very useful for doing sales research with a visual return of the information. Pull up one particular layer and you can have all of the sales from various years on your screen. Again, searching in one county can be very easy, but if all of the data were merged into one massive database, how long would a sales search take to cover the entire state? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to enter your search criteria of how many shop- ping malls sold within the last year…or even the past 5 years and have the information populate right on the state map? Many questions still remain to be answered in pursuit of a working solution. How much system memory would be needed to maintain such a database? Who will make sure that the sales information is updated timely so that our offices can use it effectively? These are some of the concerns that have been voiced while trying to provide a useful tool that would benefit our members. So, if you are one of those problem-solving people that have read this article and already thought of three possible solutions and identified probable pitfalls, we need you! Please contact me at mcoleman@citruspa.org with your suggestions. Article Contributor: Marsha Coleman, FCIAAO Director

3

Fall 2013 Newsletter of the FCIAAO