A lot of people have heard of GIS but don’t understand just how powerful of a tool it is to have in a tax sale investor’s arsenal. In this video we explain why a tax sale investor must take advantage of a county’s GIS system when possible.
Transcript:
Hey there! It’s Casey Denman here with TaxSaleAcademy.com, talking about a super powerful tool called “GIS.” Now, if you don’t know what GIS is, it stands for Geographic Information System. Like I said, it’s a super powerful tool when it comes to locating properties.
Before we start talking about GIS, let’s talk about the old school method of doing it; the method that is still used in many counties. What happens is when you have a tax list, you have a legal description that basically tells you where the property is. But unless you’re a genius, you won’t know exactly where that property is without further research.
So what you’ll do is you’ll take that legal description. If it’s a measure description, well, good luck finding it, unless you’re a surveyor. Your best case scenario for using the old school method is finding a piece of property in a subdivision. So we might say the Jones Subdivision, Lot 1 Block 1. So what you do is you look at Block 1 Lot 1 on the plat map of the Jones Subdivision and you try to transpose it onto some sort of mapping service, whether it’s Bing, Google, Yahoo! or whatever it may be, to figure out exactly where that property is. Then you measure from some sort of reference point on the plat map and hope you get the right general area. What happens here is that sometimes you won’t have reference points. It might be a subdivision on one long road so you have nowhere to measure from so you’re literally guessing at where that property is.
And number two, I was looking at a plat map yesterday that was from 1902. And a lot of areas will have very old plat maps. What happens here is over a hundred years, stuff changes. So you might be looking for Smith Ave. that’s on this plat map and it’s changed to 14th St. So good luck finding Smith Ave. on the mapping searches that you’re going to use because it’s going to be labeled as 14th St. and you’ll never find it.
And this is where GIS comes in very, very handy. It does all this information for you. It transposes the plat map onto an actual map. If it’s a Metes and Bounds Legal Description, it also puts it onto an actual map. And most counties that use GIS will have the availability of a layer that allows you to look at it as an aerial photo. So you’ll be looking at an aerial photo of the country, an aerial photo of that area, and it will have an outline of where that property is. You’ll be able to see if there’s a structure on it, you’ll be able to see what the neighbors look like and all sorts of other stuff.
A lot of GIS systems also have layers. They’ll show you school zones, where the waterlines are, if there’s any wall or septic tanks. You’ll also see voting precincts, churches. All sorts of great information that will help you make a determination whether that property is suitable for you to invest or not.
Now, we’re going to go to a very short clip. I’m going to show you the power of GIS and how it can help your business. I’ll see you after the clip.
Okay. So what we have here is a typical GIS screen when you start off. What we’re going to do is we’re going to hit “Search.” We’re going to search by the parcel number as if it’s a parcel number that we pulled off a tax sale list. Click “Run Search.” That’s going to give us the result down here. So we’re going to click on this parcel I.D. number. It’s going to load the parcel into the GIS for us, as well as some other various information on the right hand side here.
So we had this loaded onto a map. Now the cool thing becomes whenever you turn this map into an aerial photo. So we go Mapping, Layer Selection, 2011 aerials. So obviously, these are from 2011. The aerial shots are. We’ll let this load for a second, and then it shows us an aerial of the house. So obviously, you can see it’s on the southwest, 140th [court] between two houses. It actually backs up to a wooded lot and there’s a wooded lot across the street. So right off the bat, it tells us a great deal of information.
What we can also do is if we’re concerned about the flood zones, which a lot of people in Florida are, we’ll click “Flood Zones.” We’ll update the map. And then it will show us all the flood zones in this particular area. So right here, we can obviously see that we’re actually in Flood Zone X or kind of a light green or light grayish. And then over to the right hand side, that’s Flood Zone AE. So we know you’re not in Flood Zone AE.
If you’re concerned about a school district, for example, you can scroll down here to see what elementary school your kids might be going to or your buyer’s children might be going to. Click on “Elementary School.” Then click “Update Map” and it will give us the school district boundaries. And as you can see right here, it says “Dunnellon Elementary.” So you’d be going to Dunnellon Elementary School.
You can also go through and different GIS systems have different features or different layers you can use. Some are very advanced or some are very basic. This one here is about middle of the range. It’s actually fairly advanced though. You can go through building dimensions. You can click on “Dimensions” and it will show you the dimensions of the property or the building, the building type, the address, the amount of acres that a property has. It will also show you the different qualified sells in the area, which is great when you go to do your comparable sales analysis. So there are lots of cool features when it comes to GIS systems.
So I hope you enjoyed that short clip on how powerful GIS is. Unfortunately, GIS is an expense and it’s an expense that a lot of rural counties don’t have the money for. So about 50% of the counties in the country have GIS services and more and more are implementing it every day. What I suggest you doing is before you research a county, you need to make that determination whether or not that county has GIS services available. And if they do, certainly take advantage of them because it will save you a lot of time and a lot of money in the long run.
So, I hope you’ve enjoyed the video. For more information about the very lucrative tax sale business, check out my website at TaxSaleAcademy.com. Have a great day, folks! Bye-bye.