Will Google be the Appraiser’s Source for Plat Maps?

Post image for Will Google be the Appraiser’s Source for Plat Maps?

by Bryan McDonald on December 22, 2009

I was in Atlanta, GA recently using Google Maps on my iPhone and noticed that the map showed the property lines for the houses on the street I was on.  This amount of detail is not shown on my Google Maps in my market.

I was curious to know if the Google Maps showed the same information from the tax assessor’s office.  Below is a screenshot from the Google Maps on my iPhone and the electronic plat map from the county in Georgia.

GooglePlatMap image

The Google Map is on the left.  The electronic plat map from the tax assessor is on the right.  They look pretty similar.

Are you able to calculate area on Google Maps?

image Yes, with Google Earth Pro you can measure the area of a property.  Unfortunately a pro account costs $400.00 for one year.  The cost along with the fact that Google Maps does not have the property boundaries for all properties means there is no use in buying the pro version.  But, it might not be long until Google Maps is a good data source for real estate appraisers.

I found http://acme.com/planimeter/ that allows you to calculate an area on Google Maps.  The only problem is that you have to manually find the property, there is no address search function.  Once you find the property location, just click on the corners of the lot and it calculates the area.

image

Posted by Bryan McDonald (Follow me on Twitter)

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{ 1 trackback }

Google Maps Labs and 9 New Experimental Features
February 17, 2010 at 9:05 am

{ 1 comment }

AppraiserJenn December 24, 2009 at 10:34 am

Very interesting. I wonder why they don’t plug the parcel measurements into google. The data is probably from the same source.

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