By Dave Murnen and Pat Beaty

Are you thinking about buying or selling a house in Grays Harbor anytime soon?

If so, you might be interested in taking a look at the Grays Harbor County Assessor’s new website.

Assessor Dan Lindgren says he’s pleased with the new software program (Terra Scan T-2), which his staff has been using for a little while and was recently made accessible to the public.

“This new system is an officewide solution that replaces about 80 percent of all of the internal tools that we use, along with replacing the public interface through a new website search database system. Everything is integrated together to function as one complete system,” said Lindgren, who began his four-year term as assessor in January 2015. “If you have any interest in property or building information in Grays Harbor County, this is your easily accessible, user-friendly, free access to that data.”

These new tools are available on the county’s website: co.grays-harbor.wa.us. Either select “parcel search” on the home page or go to the assessor’s page.

THE NEW TOOLS

Mapsifter and Taxsifter have replaced the former parcel and sale search database tool.

“Along with the new ways to find property data is a complete new user- friendly mapping program for finding property on a map or aerial,” Lindgren said.

Mapsifter provides the ability to find a property outline for a property layered over an aerial or just a plat map with a parcel highlighted.

You can click on parcels from the map to get more detail about the property and buildings, Lindgren said.

“You will also be able to see a ‘heat’ map of sales highlighted … if you use the sale layer tool,” he said.

Taxsifter shows a lot of similar information that the prior parcel search database showed, along with a sketch and some more sale, permit and property detail. Taxsifter also give you the ability to do sale searches with a variety of options for search criteria.

MORE EFFICIENCIES

Not only is the new software expected to put more tools in the hands of the public, it should also eventually increase efficiencies in the Assessor’s Office, stretching your tax dollar further.

In 2014, Washington state law changed to require county assessors to appraise every property every year.

Before then, the Grays Harbor County Assessor’s Office inspected and appraised each property in person every four years. Now the annual assessment is made by consulting real estate sales records and comparing a property with other similar properties sold that year. Then, once every six years, an appraiser will assess each property in person.

“One of the main reasons that we purchased the new system was to increase the efficiencies within the office to keep up with unfunded mandates that have caused heavier workloads within the office,” Lindgren said. “Our legacy system just didn’t have the capability to do the job well with the limited number of staff that we have available.”

While the staff is still on a learning curve to master the new software, he said he is seeing great progress.

“The speed and comfortability for the staff has been steadily increasing over the past few weeks. I expect to see some real progress in our mass appraisal techniques as well as some real-time savings due in part to our new field devices,” he said.

“In the legacy system, our staff had to carry a tape measure, clipboard and digital camera with individual field sheets for each property,” he explained. “They would go to each home, take a picture, make notes of changes to the property on the field sheet and measure as needed, noting any measurement changes on the field sheet or graph paper. They would then have to bring all of the field sheets back to the office and hand enter all of the notes and changes into our system.”

However, with the new system’s iPad, “the appraisers will be able to go from house to house, snapping pictures and making changes to the property directly on the iPad. Once back in the office within Wi-Fi range, all of the information that was input while working out in the field will automatically upload into the program eliminating time-consuming data entry and minimizing data entry errors,” he said.

“The iPad will also have a complete countywide high-resolution aerial photography and parcel layer installed — no internet needed — to help locate properties or find roads into properties, etc., which eliminates much of the prep work and printing of maps that was necessary in the old system,” he said.

In addition, Lindgren said the new software is able to make more precise annual reassessments. “The added query capability for us is making our statistical work far easier and giving us more opportunity to tighten up values countywide as we move forward,” he said.

Dave Murnen and Pat Beaty are construction specialists at NeighborWorks of Grays Harbor County, where Murnen is executive director. This is a nonprofit organization committed to creating safe and affordable housing for all residents of Grays Harbor County. For questions about home repair, renting, remodeling or buying, call 360-533-7828 or visit 710 E. Market St. in Aberdeen.