LightBox Assessment

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Nationwide property assessment with over 300 fields including property characteristics, owner information, and sales transactions.

Overview

Having rich property attributes is critical to any property-centric dataset. One of the best sources is the county tax authority or tax assessor. The assessor maintains many property attributes mainly used for taxation, as a result of that, the assessor must maintain this data and keep it current.

Determine precise property data
Uncover detailed property characteristics and precise parcel boundary locations for 100% of the US population.

Understand property ownership
Find the current owner of any property along with contact information.

Identify assessed value and transaction history
Understand assessed land values, improvement values and percentages, and the property tax paid.

Tightly linked to Parcels
Assessments are tightly linked to all the data within SmartFabric products, but one valuable link is via the LightBox ID, is to the LightBox Parcel dataset.

Note:

Traditional assessment data comes with an address and no spatial location. The typical way to apply a spatial location is to run the data through a Geocoder and apply a point location. This can work, but in some cases you will not get a point on a map. Vacant land properties are a good example where an address might not exist on the data.

LightBox has gone through the process of making this connection for you. Not only do we ship the spatial location, we ship it as both a polygon and a parcel point location.

See Parcel vs Assessment Relationship and Parcel to Assessment matching for more information on this topic.

Data Collection

There are three groups of data that is collected at the tax assessor's office:

Assessment data

Assessment data is typically collected once a year during the publishing of the annual tax roll by the tax assessor. The data is processed through our data pipeline, normalizing where necessary, and performing all the linkages via the LightBox ID. Once through the pipeline it is added to our master database and made immediately available to our products.

Tax data

Similar to the assessment data, tax data is collected annually. Once through the pipeline, tax data is applied back to our master assessment dataset and made immediately available to our products.

Sales transactions

Sales transactions are slightly different since sales are continuously throughout the year and not during an annual event such as the assessment data. LightBox collects sales transactions throughout the year, typically 3-5 weeks after a sale has been recorded at the county office. The sales transaction data is put through our data pipeline to do any necessary normalization and perform the necessary linkages back to the Assessment and Parcel data.

Sales Transactions are then applied back to our master database and made immediately available to our products.

Pro Tip:

customers and customers have access to assessment data along with sales transactions as soon as they are made available.

The LightBox Identifier is a persistent and universal identifier for data that creates powerful connections to the LightBox information model. Our Assessment dataset supports this ID and is available through the assessment API and SmartFabric™ data package. Using the LightBox ID will go through the full property graph.

LightBox ID connectivity graph