Geographical competency has become a hot topic for real estate appraisers. There have been a lot of complaints about real estate appraisers appraising properties in an area they are unfamiliar with.
The video below shows how you can use Google Maps to show your geographic competency. All you need is a list of property addresses that you have appraised, a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel, and the website Batchgeo.com.
Cick HERE if you can not see the embedded video above.
I have a database of addresses that I have personally appraised since I started my career as a real estate appraiser. I wanted to graphically show my experience so anyone could easily determine my geographical competence.
One thing that I did not want to do, because of privacy concerns, is publish the exact address of the properties I have appraised. Instead, I just wanted to publish the street, city, state, and zip codes.
In order to strip out the house number from each address I had to use several Excel functions.
- LEN returns the number of characters in a text string.
- LEFT or RIGHT returns the first character or characters in a text string, based on the number of characters you specify.
- FIND locates one text string within a second text string, and return the number of the starting position of the first text string from the first character of the second text string.
- ISNUMBER determines if a character is a number or not. If there is a number in the string, the result is TRUE, otherwise it is FALSE.
This article is an excellent resource if you need to extract numbers from strings.
Example
My data was formatted with the the address, a dash, the city, a comma, the state, and a 5 digit zip code.
100 Main St – Perry, GA 31069
The first thing I wanted to do was remove the zip code and state from the address. This is easy because it is all of the information before the last 10 characters (5 digit zip code, 2 digit state, 1 comma, and 2 spaces = 10 characters).
This is the formulas I used:
=LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-10)
The above formula returns “100 Main St – Perry”
I used the function LEN to determine how many characters were in the sting and use LEFT to tell excel to return all of the characters minus 10 characters starting at the left side.
Next, I wanted to determine how many numbers were in the property address. Fortunately for me all of the properties in my markets have only 3 to 5 numbers in the property address.
=IF(ISNUMBER(1*(LEFT(C1,5))),5,IF(ISNUMBER(1*(LEFT(C1,4))),4,IF(ISNUMBER(1*(LEFT(C1,3))),3,0)))
The above formula returns “4”
This is a lengthy formula. I nested several IF THEN statements and use the ISNUMBER function to determine how many of the first characters were numbers. This formula returns the number 4 telling me there are 4 numbers in the address, the house number plus the blank character. I can use this number to strip out the house number.
=RIGHT(C1,(LEN(C1)-D1))
The above formula will return “Main St”
Hopefully, you won’t have to go through these formulas to get your data formatted correctly. If you do have to format your data a little, you should be able to use some combination of the functions above.
Batchgeo is a great website and very easy to use. They have several how-to videos to help you get started and be sure to check out their blog.
Would you use Batchgeo to help publish a list of property addresses (minus the house number) that you have appraised? Do you think doing so would help instill trust?
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Bryan, Wow!!! This is an awesome idea and would be a fantastic addition to the “approved appraiser application package” when applying to a new client where you include your resume’, e & o insurance, state certification, etc.. Thank you so very much for this helpful information. I’m working on this right now and have posted a link to your helpful article on the Tips site. Thanks Again! Bill Cobb
Thanks Bill. This is something each appraiser should think about doing something like this. What a great way to graphically show your expertise and experience.
Bryan-
Great article. Thanks for the 411 on Batch Geo. I started a similar project by manually hot linking individual records in Excel to a saved google map, but of course it is a tedious process of 1 record at a time.
It will also be an excellent home page graphic image illustration of an appraiser’s experience – that you’re not a newbie appraiser. I’m using BatchGeo to process over 6,000 addresses and that’s just since 2001. It may be a while before I have the results and I will make the paypal donation they ask for to help out because they are certainly helping me. Bill
Bryan, I also added a second post this morning to Tips with more linking to your post above asking “Would A Geographical Competency Map Help You In Expert Witness Testimony?” making the point about how valuable such a map would be if given a copy to the judge and both attorneys proving that you have appraised 571 properties within that immediate market area you’re testifying about since 1990. I think your post and the time you took to put it together is probably one of the helpful for appraisers I’ve seen. Thank you so much! Bill Cobb
Thanks Wendell. Let me know if you create a map with BathGeo. I would love to see it!
Thanks for the great work!
Maybe that site can have other uses like mapping out your comps.
Thanks George! I think you are right, it would be an easy way to map out your comps.
Hi Bryan- Bill Cobb sent me. I’d like to publish the story in Working RE- either the text or video- not sure if the story needs the video but we can discuss the details. First I’d like to know if you’re amenable.
David, Thank you for the interest! I sent you an email so we can discuss further.
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