Located on the southeast coast of Florida, 120 miles north of Miami, Martin County is best known for its abundance of beautiful waterways and excellent sport fishing. In fact, Martin County contains the greatest amount of waterfront property in Florida. This includes the Atlantic Ocean on its east coast, Lake Okeechobee on its western border, and the Intercoastal Waterway, Indian River, St Lucie River, and numerous smaller bodies of water in between.
Water sports enthusiasts flock to Martin County from all over the country for various activities including sail fishing, bass fishing, sail boarding and boating. In addition, Jupiter Island, which sits off the east coast of Martin County, is listed by Worth Magazine as the nation’s wealthiest community. Jupiter Island is home to PGA Tour stars Greg Norman and Nick Price.
The amount of waterfront property and the large homes on Jupiter Island present quite a challenge to Martin County’s Property Appraiser’s office when it comes time to value the county’s 87,000 parcels of real property and 20,000 personal property filings.
In January of 2002, this challenge brought the Martin County Property Appraiser’s office, led by Laurel Kelly, CFA, to a critical review of its business practices.
The office had been using an old character based, 4GL UNIX system that was inefficient, costly to repair, difficult to support and did not produce reliable data as it was collected and entered into the system. While, the office staff had become accustomed to this old system and had built its business procedures around it, the County’s improvement goals highlighted an obvious need for new methods and new software.
Laurel Kelly’s mission was to find new software that would not only increase the overall productivity of her office but also allow the County to efficiently and accurately appraise each parcel yearly.
Martin County purchased Manatron’s CAMA solution, including the ProVal® valuation-engine, Personal Property and Assessment Administration in January of 2002. Because Manatron CAMA is a complete software appraisal tool and provides a multitude of capabilities, some that Martin County had never had the benefit of, the County began to reevaluate its appraisal process. When installation of Manatron CAMA began, Laurel Kelly and her staff decided to review all of their business processes to find out what changes needed to be made in order to take advantage of the greater capabilities of the new software.
The result was a completely reorganized neighborhood and land evaluation structure. Also, the data conversion process and fit analysis were used to re-engineer a number of other business processes.
The County also wanted to have the ability to analyze waterfront land values over multiple neighborhoods and by the newly defined land types. Some advanced features to do this were not available in Manatron CAMA at the time the product was purchased, resulting in enhancements to the software. These analysis capabilities are now available to all users of Manatron CAMA.
This process is a good illustration of the product’s evolution over the past decade. It began as a standard appraisal tool and has numerous user-recommended enhancements, resulting in a product today that embodies the best appraisal practices in North America.
To further improve the efficiency of the appraisal process, Martin County decided to spatially enable its CAMA data through GIS connections with the County’s mapping system. The County accomplished this by implementing a Manatron Business Partner product, Parcel Analyst from Smart Data Strategies (SDS).
“The marriage of Manatron CAMA and Parcel Analyst has allowed us to achieve a visual representation of our tabular data that yields a more thorough understanding of our data, which in turn ensures a more accurate valuation of our parcels,” said Kelly.
As the County’s appraisal staff adjusted to the new software and procedures, the advantages of each became evident. As a result, Martin County is now able to more accurately and efficiently move through the appraisal process. Going live in February of 2003, Martin County became the first Florida installation for Manatron CAMA and the County was the first site in the U.S. to complete a full county-wide appraisal using the newest generation Manatron CAMA.
“Our mission at the Martin County Property Appraiser’s office is to fairly appraise all properties so that taxpayers pay only their fair share of taxes, and to treat everyone with courtesy, honesty and respect,” Kelly added. “We believe that Manatron CAMA and the SDS Parcel Analyst program are allowing us to achieve these goals with greater efficiency and lower cost.”
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