GISValTech2025

Enjoy breakfast and discuss your technology needs in the exhibit hall this morning.

Buckle up, folks! This session is your crash course in using GIS to make property assessments and appeals less painful (for everyone involved). We will show you how Cuyahoga County used maps to make their reappraisal process more transparent (and less likely to cause a riot). Then, we'll head down south to Bossier Parish to see how they're using GIS to fight property tax appeals like pros.

You will learn how to use maps to explain those pesky assessments to the public, spot wonky valuations before they become a problem, and even win those dreaded appeals. We promise it'll be way more fun than it sounds!

• Peaking Behind the Curtain: How GIS Empowers Transparency in Cuyahoga County’s Reappraisal
  Jordan Abbott, GIS Analyst, Cuyahoga County, Cleveland, OH
  Tom Fisher, GISP, AICP, Enterprise Geospatial Technologies Administrator, Cuyahoga County, Cleveland, OH
• Mapping Success: Leveraging GIS in property Tax Appeals
  Jake Parkinson, Assessor Consultant, Valuebase, Salt Lake City, UT
  Bobby Edmiston, Assessor, Bossier Parish, Louisiana, Benton, LA

We will discuss leading through change with resiliency, failing-forward, and four-letter words.

Megan Lukens, Assessment Business Systems Manager, City of Madison, Wisconsin
Michelle Drea, City Assessor, City of Madison, Wisconsin

Take free self-paced lessons on a variety of GIS and ArcGIS topics. Esri's Hands-On Learning Lab will be at GIS/ValTech 2025.

This session will address the often-overlooked challenge of selecting the best market value proxy when detecting vertical inequity in mass valuations. Using a real-world dataset and Monte Carlo simulations, the presentation will demonstrate how bias varies with different proxies. Finally, a new statistical market value proxy will be introduced to improve valuation accuracy.

• Proposing a New Market Value Proxy for Vertical Inequity Detection
  Josh Myers, Mass Appraisal Consultant, Josh Myers Valuation Solutions, Chesapeake, VA

Opportunity to attend a presentation from our conference sponsors. Stay tuned for details as the sessions in this track are filled. Our sponsors pave the way as trend setters and technology champions. Be sure to attend these sessions and also visit the exhibit hall to stay a step ahead.

Interested in securing a spot? Be sure to sign up as a sponsor/exhibitor. Opportunities posted here.

Opportunity to attend a presentation from our conference sponsors. Stay tuned for details as the sessions in this track are filled. Our sponsors pave the way as trend setters and technology champions. Be sure to attend these sessions and also visit the exhibit hall to stay a step ahead.

Interested in securing a spot? Be sure to sign up as a sponsor/exhibitor. Opportunities posted here.

Get ready to ditch those dusty old blueprints and embrace the digital revolution! This session will show you how high-tech tools like street-level imagery and LiDAR are transforming the way assessors do their jobs. We'll take you on a behind-the-scenes tour of how Clark County, OH is using these tools to catch property tax dodgers and keep their records squeaky clean. Then, we'll head over to Clermont County to see how they're using sketch verification to uncover hidden revenue and streamline their assessment process. You'll learn how to spot those sneaky property changes, recover lost tax dollars, and maybe even impress your boss (or at least avoid getting fired). So, grab your gadgets and get ready to geek out on GIS!

• Support Cyclical Reassessments with Street Level Imagery
  Bill Wetzel, Account Executive-Midwest, Cyclomedia Technology, Inc., Middleton, WI
  Shayne Gray, GIS Director, Clark County Auditor’s Office, Springfield, OH
• Sketch Verification: The Key to Uncovering Lost Revenue and Boosting Accuracy with Clermont County, OH
  Joe Oddi, Director of Partner Strategies, EagleView
  Cindy Hawk, Deputy Auditor, Clermont County, OH

In this two-part session, recognize the impact onboarding and professional development has on office culture and learn how multiagency collaboration can reduce redundancy and make us more effective stewards of taxpayer dollars.

• Multiagency Contract Collaboration
  Joseph Brewer, Mapping Supervisor, AL Department of Revenue
• Shifting Organizational Culture Through Onboarding & Professional Development
  Monica Williams, Deputy Chief Assessment Officer, Office of Property Assessment, City of Philadelphia
  James Aros, Jr., Chief Assessment Officer, Office of Property Assessment, City of Philadelphia

Take free self-paced lessons on a variety of GIS and ArcGIS topics. Esri's Hands-On Learning Lab will be at GIS/ValTech 2025.

Valuation is coming! This session covers key factors in valuation, including location, time adjustments, square footage, construction quality, and property condition, providing practical guidance for assessors to improve their methods and avoid common pitfalls. This session also examines how proximity to residential meth labs affects nearby property values in Albuquerque using GIS and spatial regression techniques.

• Is There a Heisenberg Effect? Using GIS to Investigate the Impact of Residential Meth Labs on Nearby Property Values in Albuquerque, NM
  Damian Lara, Esq., Residential Manager, Bernalillo County Assessor’s Office, NM
  Fabian Montoya, Deputy Assessor, Bernalillo County Assessor’s Office, NM
  Paul Bidanset, Founder/Research Scientist, Center for Appraisal Research and Technology
• Model Mastery: Five Characteristics That Make or Break Your Model
  Jake Parkinson, Assessor Consultant, Valuebase, Salt Lake City, UT

Stay tuned to see if one of our amazing sponsors will host a Lunch & Learn session!
These sessions are great opportunities to connect with representatives and learn more about their products and services.

Otherwise, there are several nearby lunch option spots, including the North Market.

Stay tuned to see if one of our amazing sponsors will host a Lunch & Learn session!
These sessions are great opportunities to connect with representatives and learn more about their products and services.

Otherwise, there are several nearby lunch option spots, including the North Market.

The Exhibition shuts down after this hour-long break. Spend these last 60 valuable minutes gathering the specs you need to make solutions decisions for your organization, and listen for your name to be called during the raffle prize drawings!

The Valuation Office Agency (VOA) successfully generates Council Tax bands for 26m+ residences and Business Rates for 2m+ non-domestic properties, yielding over £60bn for Local Authorities in England and Wales.

For several decades, the VOA has used a combination of specialist human knowledge and a relatively simple geospatial ecosystem. In 2019, the Business Systems Transformation (BST) program was set up to address VOA’s longstanding technical debt and meet an aspiration to develop resilience to changes in government policy.

This provided an opportunity to completely redesign the geospatial ecosystem, which is a core component of location intelligence used in property valuation.

The tasks included the transformation of a) ageing technology; b) legacy geo-analytical processes; c) fragmented geospatial data governance; and d) limited geospatial data and science literacy. In 2023, BST successfully delivered VOA’s first enterprise-level Geographical Information System (GIS), VMS, with the following activities:

1. Incorporating business and users’ needs closely during the design of application, change management, and learning; and incorporating best practices from other organizations.
2. Reducing development time, cutting expenses, and enabling reconfiguration for any type of mapping by using a single source code to create various VMS versions.
3. Enabling the historical mapping, multi-criteria decision-making, and interactive exploration through linked views.
4. Using rigorous novel geo-analytics to redefine how VOA models and visualizes the geographical homogeneity of valuation and link the properties to other geospatial intelligence.

VMS is used daily by over 1000 users within the VOA. Users have reported improved productivity, quality, and an uplift in their working experience.

Provision of variety of authoritative data layers (latest maps, aerial images, street views) in a single interface has made it easier to remain in a single workflow, rather than switching between windows. Use of government address data standards such as UPRN has reduced ambiguities in address search.

Aside from operational users, VMS has also been a catalyst in the use of geospatial data, science and technology for automated valuation modelling and machine learning by data scientists.

Sanjay Rana, Geospatial Lead, Valuation Office Agency (VOA), Bristol, United Kingdom

Summit County will share its journey on how eliminating paper and duplicate data entry via a real-time synchronization of systems greatly streamlines field and office tasks.

Dominic Basile, RES, AAS, Director of Real Estate and Appraisal, Summit County Fiscal Office
Daniel Anderson, VP/Practice Leader, Data Cloud Solutions, A Woolpert Company

Take free self-paced lessons on a variety of GIS and ArcGIS topics. Esri's Hands-On Learning Lab will be at GIS/ValTech 2025.

This session will present a case study on the 2024 revaluation of Central Falls, a small city with 3,000 parcels, comparing modern revaluation tools like regression and AVM against traditional market-adjusted cost methods. Additionally, we will explore a real estate data visualization tool created for Philadelphia (~ 600,000 parcels) which integrates city and external data sources to support decision-making for various users like homeowners, developers, and city planners.

• Central Falls Case Study – Testing Modern Approaches to Value in a Small New England Community
  Daniel Ducharme, Ph.D., RICA, Assessor, Central Falls, RI
• Creating Value Through Connecting Siloed Big Data
  Jimmy Williams, Mass Appraisal Supervisor, Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment, PA
  Alex Raju, Supervisor of Analytics, Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment, PA

Opportunity to attend a presentation from our conference sponsors. Stay tuned for details as the sessions in this track are filled. Our sponsors pave the way as trend setters and technology champions. Be sure to attend these sessions and also visit the exhibit hall to stay a step ahead.

Interested in securing a spot? Be sure to sign up as a sponsor/exhibitor. Opportunities posted here.

A case study of GIS use in the 2023 countywide reappraisal conducted by the Franklin County Auditor’s office. The Auditor and GIS Director will share approaches to determine values, prepare constituents, and track the impacts of historic value increases while striving to incorporate best practices for appraisal, minimizing bias, and incorporating new technologies.

New software was utilized by appraisers to collect data for sketch validation and parcel descriptions. A GIS application helped appraisers reconfigure neighborhood delineations and visualize property characteristics easily. A new website, “Know your Home Value” was introduced that allowed constituents to compare their home values with their neighbors and included a tax estimator. This work continued to track the appellate process and address concerns and questions resulting from the value and related tax changes.

Constituent engagement was focused on accessibility and transparency. In 9 months leading up to the release of the proposed values, over 100 community presentations shared GIS maps, delineated neighborhoods, and sales review comparisons to prepare the constituents for the forecasted value increases while a targeted public relations campaign addressed the factors that went into this “perfect storm”.