Louisville’s PVA (Property Valuation Administrator) sets all the property values in Jefferson County Kentucky for government and municipal tax purposes. There is a PVA in each county in Kentucky, and they are run by the state government. They have an elaborate internal database that integrates with municipal GIS mapping software that the city provides. And they put all these property values online for the public in a searchable list. However, the PVA did not have a user-friendly, easy, fast, and inexpensive way to turn their data into an interactive map for their website. That’s where they turned to Your Mapper’s affiliate, GovMapper, which specializes in getting government data online and on maps.

Property Valuation Administrator - Property Value Map

Their partnership with GovMapper allowed them to create an interactive map for their citizens. After loading their data into the underlying Your Mapper platform, they were able to get a map for their site in just a few days’ time. They created a database export that followed the Open Municipal Geodata Standard format, which let us load their data and “geocode” it quickly. The result is an improvement to their website with a visual mapping tool that makes browsing for property information much easier.

It’s a perfect example of working with existing government data, and creating an interactive map for the forward-thinking Tony Lindauer and his government agency’s site. It’s going to keep people coming back to their site, and gain a whole new following of people that find the Your Mapper site then see the property value map. Not only does it improve the way people search for information, it raises everyone’s expectations for what the government should be providing to its citizens.

The PVA also has a monthly subscription service of detailed property parcel information for advanced users, so they really want to be the local source for property information, and get people onto their site through search engine optimization and referrals. Since the property values are also published to the public Your Mapper site, their information can be found on Your Mapper through web searches, and each map popup and detail page links back to their source site. This funnels thousands of targeted users to their data and site, because every property location in Your Mapper gets its own SEO optimized page.

As part of the Your Mapper platform, the PVA’s citizens also get access to RSS and KML data feeds of the searches they use most, and a mobile version of the data for when they are on the go.

It’s a win-win-win situation for everyone involved: the PVA, GovMapper, and the public.

Louisville Property Value Map Details

The property values from the PVA are centered on middle of each property parcel. The resulting map shows 100% of the 311,096 assessed properties across the city of metro Louisville. Every location is geocoded because the PVA provides this latitude and longitude information from the municipal source. 279,772 unique addresses are shown on the map (since some property values are part of single-address condominiums).

Tagged as: data, dataset, key, louisville, map, mapping, maps, property, property values, pva, real estate