Commercial Appraisal Data Sharing

Some real property data that you personally collect, can be shared with your clients, appraiser contacts and others without concern about copyright infringements.  If for example you collect sales information from public records and / or parties to a transaction and build your own sales database, like I do, you may have years of sales information that can be sorted and broken down by property type (like Apartments, Offices, Retail, Industrial and Vacant Land) or if land by its zoning category.

So if an appraiser or broker contacts you and asks about apartments you can access your database, I use Microsoft Access, and share some or all of your data with them. Yes, it’s easier to just subscribe to a data service and let the service collect and verify the data, but appraisers are supposed to verify their own sales data and not rely on a paid service to do it for them.  It’s my opinion that a broker or and appraiser can lose touch with the market by relying only on a data service.

Data collection for commercial appraisals is more difficult to accomplish than many people imagine. You may be able to get many pieces of data from the City or County Assessor, Recorder, Planner and the Treasurer.  Data like; parcel number, property address, building size, site size, a sketch, construction detail, legal description, zoning map, planning map, an aerial photo, a soils map, a flood map, a subdivision map, assessment, taxes and other property specific facts.  Collecting it can however be quite time consuming.   

Facts from the government agencies via websites are also not likely to enlighten you about very important property factors like; location, access, frontage, traffic, signalized intersections, orientation, finish quality, lease terms, tenant mix, tenant credit quality, parking, building sustainability and a range of other important factors.  You have to analyze the basic data that you collect because few government agencies look closely at things like; land-to-building ratios, parking ratios and infrastructure development.  Many don’t care about the vacancy rate, the rental rate or the long-term viability of an income stream.  They are going to get their taxes whether you keep a building’s cash flow up in the profitable range where it should be or not.

Data that isn’t protected from public view (proprietary) on the internet is generally available for a real estate agent or an appraiser to use unless the site makes some claim to protect it via its the terms of use policy.  If you agreed to not use it for any purpose that’s one thing, but many sites provide free information to the public and the data can be used.  The game is afoot and if the big companies get their way you will never be able to find and collect any data via the internet because it will all be owned by someone else. 

You can collect real property data from a number of people including brokers, appraisers, title companies, buyers, sellers, tenants, landlords and others, it’s not that difficult to just keep the data that they share with you for future use.  As it becomes harder to collect internet-based data it’s my opinion that more people may collect it via third-party sources.   Getting locked out of your own specialty by greedy companies motivates some to find their own way to secure the data that they need.

I’m always open to data sharing, some information like cell tower site sales, direct capitalization rates, outdoor advertising sign site sales and other data is hard to come by so exchanging with others is one of the only ways to get it.  Contact me at grigdon@cox.net if you have data that you can share, maybe we can both benefit.

For more appraisal information contact Glenn J. Rigdon MA, MRICS, IFAS, ASA who is a Las Vegas / Henderson Nevada based broker and appraiser who can be contacted via email or via his business website known as Appraiser Las Vegas  (http://www.appraiserlasvegas.com), or http://www.horizonvillageappraisal.com, or you can also click on “Contact Us” on the home page of this website or visit my public profile at LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/glenn-rigdon-ma-mrics-asa/1a/30b/879/

Article source: http://www.appraisalarticles.com/Narrative-Report-Writing/4739-Commercial-Appraisal-Data-Sharing.html