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no chance hi everyone and welcome I'm Maggie McCulloch president of policy map and again welcome to map chats our webinar today is on land banks and how to very innovative land banks have used data to both shape their strategies and implement their programs for those of you who are signing on to map chats for the first time policy-map the organization that's behind this webinar series is a national online mapping service that provides maps and data visualization tools for tens of thousands of indicators related to housing health demographics and more map chats is a free webinar series which we just started this year in order to create a place for people to share their stories and learn how others are using data and maps in their work map Chet's features experts from a variety of topics including housing policy healthy food access creative placemaking and now with today's call land banks our speakers discuss how their work incorporates geographic data and maps and gives each of you our audience a chance to see firsthand the invaluable role that maps and data can really play in the everyday work of both policymakers and practitioners before we get started I just want to introduce a couple of housekeeping notes note that this is a webinar format and so everyone right now is muted but if you have any questions and obviously we hope that you do we'd like you to type them into the GoToWebinar panel at any time just type in your question into that panel and we will answer you during the Q&A for at the end of the presentations will also be recording this map chat and we'll post it to our YouTube channel and blog so what I'd like to do first is introduce our two speakers Robert Lin and Michael Schramm's thank you both and then I'm going to turn it over first to Robert and then to Michael as I mentioned previously we're going to save the questions to the Q&A session at the end and then if there are any questions which we are unable to get to during the webinar we will reach out to you after with answers to your questions so for those of you really that have been wondering what a land bank is I just wanted to start by saying that it is defined as a government or community owned entity that acquires manages maintains and repurposes vacant abandoned and foreclosed properties according to one estimate there are now approximately 120 land banks and land banking programs across the country so Robert we'd like to start with you by way of introduction Robert is the senior data manager at the Detroit land bank Authority Robert manages an inventory of over 80,000 parcels while overseeing the development of land use policy and the use of data streams to create more granular and proactive responses to the city's vacant properties and Robert it's all yours oh thank you so much for having me Maggie greetings from a Detroit I'm roblin a senior data manager at the Detroit land bank authority as he said founded in 2010 the deal ba is among the minority of land banks across the country that operate at the scale of a city rather than a county or regional jurisdiction like most of our peers the Detroit land bank serves to return tax reverted and blighted properties to productive reuse and improve quality of life in the city's neighborhoods it's a big honor to be joining Mike here since we look to them as the experts on so many of these issues today the vlba is the largest land bank in the nation with the growing inventory of nearly 80,000 parcels my role at the land bank is that of inventory manager and working to address titles of issue of title delinquent taxes and blight among our property holdings using large scale data streams from a multifarious set of sources to triage our properties into appropriate programs and move them towards ultimate sale and reuse the fundamental issue we run into is that our inventory is too large to handle most issues on a property of a property basis so much of our work from ordering demolition activities to clearing delinquent taxes occurs through bulk work along these lines are need for property investment exceeds our available resources and so we do a great deal of work and modeling to better target our work based upon neighborhood and property conditions the story of land use in real estate in Detroit is inextricably tied to population loss in 1950 the city's population topped 1.8 million and today has declined to roughly 700,000 unfortunately however as people migrated out of Detroit they didn't take their houses with them and so Detroit has left with an overabundance of substandard housing with rock-bottom values though the city's population is stabilizing the latest estimates from the Census Bureau indicate that the city still has nearly 100,000 vacant housing units across its 139 square miles the research consensus on these issues is that in aggregate they can abandon home skin to press surrounding property values increased crime spur population loss disincentivize property investment even affect to the transportation mode split among other impacts furthermore many researchers have documented that blight is a contagion and so it is both a cause and effect of neighborhood instability through a long-standing problem in Detroit the issue came to the fore in Detroit during the city's 2013 on municipal bankruptcy process when the scope of blood issues was a key issue in the city's bankruptcy in this context the White House convened a blight removal task force in the fall of 2013 after a relatively thorough hunting and gathering phase to compile research and experience based vantage points on the issue the task force established a set of recommendations to guide the city approach to blight remediation over the long term these recommendations were thoughtful and diverse including the development of a centralized department of neighborhoods to serve as the point of contact for all property related issues to develop an open data portal to facilitate the transparent tracking of progress and a tipping point neighborhood strategy that puts emphasis on those neighborhoods at the greatest risk of further disinvestment I'll touch on a number of recommendations throughout the rest of this slide deck that said however two of those recommendations have had the biggest impact on the local blight fight the first was the development of a citywide windshield survey of parcels called Motor City mapping which has been an incredibly useful asset underlying all of our work the other key recommendation was the significant retooling and dramatic expansion of the Detroit land bank Authority for which I now work as one of two especially prominent recommendations for the blight task force the Motor City mapping project set out to produce a baseline survey of all 380,000 parcels of property in the city and to develop a platform that would allow for continual updates by residents neighborhood groups and city workers one of the nagging challenges facing all previous efforts to eradicate blight in the city has been a complete lack of data to track and target cleanup efforts to remedy this the taskforce implemented a citywide survey the initial survey consisted of 75 survey teams that worked from mid-december 2013 through january 2014 the survey used nokia seventh a blitz to blacks zinc text photos in tabular data about each property well on foot or from their cars using an app developed by local tech company Loveland technologies the surveyors captured data on a total of eleven variables in addition to tracking whether each property was a structure or a lot the survey captured data specific to lots and structures for structures surveyors noted the use dition number of units whether a property was fire damage and whether the property was open a trespass for Lots the survey tracked whether there was illegal dumping whether the property was open to trespass and whether there were improvements and finally whether there was a discernible public use by the spring of 2014 the blade Task Force had published a full data set with corollary spatial objects the central database was built with Ruby and includes a full interactive parcel level map you can check it out at WWDC d mapping calm this rich granular look at property conditions in the city has afforded us an incredible found a all other data analysis efforts longer term the project also established the Bleck sting app for mobile phones residents neighborhood associations civic org city workers can blex to updates as properties change before these updates occur to the cloud-based central database professional surveyors quality control each blacks to ensure that the photos of the right property and that the tabular data is an accurate depiction of the photo beyond the baseline survey data the task force also developed an analysis of neighborhoods and of properties using the survey data and a number of ancillary data sets the task force is central most noteworthy findings were around the scale of the blight in the city using Motor City mapping alongside 16 other data sets local nonprofit data consultancy data-driven detroit came up with index to identify blighted properties in the city in total data-driven Detroit looked at a range of indicators including tax and mortgage foreclosures public property ownership dangerous building complaints fire insurance claims previous property surveys and assessment data among other data sets in the end their findings were staggering they exceeded all expectations the task force found that there were 80 4641 structures that were in need of anti blight intervention including 40,000 77 structures that were clearly bladed and 38,000 structures had some indications of blight the other key recommendation from the blight task force was for the city to revivify the Detroit land bank Authority when the land bank was initially established in 2010 it served as a small-scale vehicle for the city to complete home rehabs as part of the federal Neighborhood Stabilization program the authority had five staff and several hundred properties that rapidly changed once the blade task force report came out and the Detroit land bank Authority grew rapidly to address many of the recommendations ultimately the Detroit land bank grew three programmatic pillars disposition demolition and nuisance abatement our data team of five analysts operate and continually update our centralized property management platform the team serves as the connective tissue and coordinating body between all three program teams this is a screen grab of our website ww building Detroit org where we host daily auctions sell fully rehabbed homes sell raw unreal mixed price and sell side Lots our most well-known disposition program our daily auction of three homes is based entirely online where we sell properties in the city's strongest neighborhoods for buyers to rehab we use hundreds of available datasets to filter our inventory and ensure that properties get into the appropriate demolition or disposition pipeline as soon as possible although many of our programs are restricted to particular target areas some combination of our programs operate in every neighborhood across the city depending on the funding available in the most targeted intervention for each neighborhood in total the dl ba owns approximately 80,000 parcels has 80 staff demolishes 4,000 homes a year and commences nuisance abatement hearings against a thousand properties and sells several thousand properties of the year at any given time we have approximately 25,000 side las listed for sale and available to residents the fundamental challenge the dl ba face is the inability to tackle the entirety of the vacant property issue at once and so we consequently need to target our efforts where we believe they'll have the largest impact all of our efforts look to stabilize populations and real estate markets and so we use a full suite of real estate data to target our work and establish programmatic boundaries we most frequently look to real estate values population change mortgage originations land assembly potential and real estate market volumes building permits and home fires when we assess neighborhoods to target our efforts one of the land banks primary roles is to serve as the owner of last resort for foreclosed blighted and vacant homes in the city by the end of January we expect to hold title to more than one hundred thousand properties or more than one in four properties in the city to the best of our knowledge with the largest landowner in the nation as measured by the number of parcels historically one of the chief challenges of dealing with tax routed properties in Detroit was the fact that public ownership was so dispersed as many as 20 public agencies from the public school district to the water department held surplus vacant property one of our chief projects to date has been to transfer all of those properties to the land bank to establish a simple centralized resource for assembling and settling publicly on properties well most of our properties have come from other public agencies we also actively gather property from the state of Michigan unsold tax per closures from the Wayne County Treasurer vacant bank owned properties donations from private citizens as well as default judgments from owners of nuisance abatement properties through our nuisance abatement program land banking the is a really tricky business between our inventory and programmatic activities we track thousands of variables about our properties are Newton's abatement defendants our property purchasers properties held by other public agencies and properties undergoing demolition to track and coordinate all of our activities we use a heavily heavily modified instance of salesforce i'm sure most folks know sales forces the customer relationship management or so-called crm platform but fundamentally what we found is that is a highly adaptable cloud-based relational database a team of pros from enterprise communities and our own gifted Salesforce admin have developed a versatile robust platform our Salesforce system went live in April 2015 one of the simplest but most game-changing differences between Salesforce and most of the other inventory tracking systems I've seen is that in Salesforce we're tracking hundreds of data points about the geographic physical and financial condition of every status and property in the city consequently when we add a property to our inventory it is simply a matter of flipping a switch more importantly more importantly will already have a pretty extensive background profile on the property allowing us to more rapidly conduct triage on the property sales force is a cloud-based system so we're also able to integrate with other platforms pretty simply we're a few days out from integrating with the city's new so credit open data portal so residents can track our actions and take data polls to do their own analysis of our work longer-term we're looking to develop API connectivity to other government platforms including the register of deeds the city's assessment platform the building departments building permit system as well as our own sales sites so changes in Salesforce can automatically migrate across City platforms and the Salesforce system will be more robust allowing our staff to see a more recent richer look to properties at any given time we have staff working on a litany of activities from tracking soil based contamination to clearing delinquent taxes scheduling lawn mowing to arranging interior structural inspections or reporting title search results negotiating donation agreements etc at any time staff are simultaneously entering data and working on every facet of a property to overcome this potential train Iraq of simultaneous activity our Salesforce platform uses distinct record types in a series of automated workflows to avoid conflicting activities and mandates staff follow up when necessary the central record type in Salesforce is the property with a steep hierarchy of subordinate record types below that below the property we have major programmatic records called cases that include a great deal of summary data and history of the land banks work with a property blow this we have activities the sort of component actions that support a more major action these activitie
are like board ups title searches auction open houses demolition inspections and quiet title actions in turn these activity records have their own subordinate records to track even more granular actions such as invoice approvals and resident complaints through automated workflows built into the relational database any action at one level of the property will dynamically update all records beneath it or above it this tree diagram really only reveals the first two layers of the onion but there are many more this model also allows us to implement rigorous conflict detection and so staff can schedule demolition if we have a pending open house for example we're also keeping close tabs on in the city we do this both to measure the impact of our work and maintain an ongoing resource assessment of the city to ensure that every neighborhood is leaving the appropriate market intervention in the with a long history of population loss one indicator we look to fairly frequently as population migration and especially newly occupied homes this map was made with address level vacancy data from the United States Postal Service through a geocoding service called semaphore like the signal flags the land bank can tap into the post offices vast wealth of vacancy data as mail carriers complete their routes they track which houses are vacant and which are occupied to help inform their own mail forwarding system though a lagging indicator of vacancy this is among the more rapid indicators of housing vacancy we have another common metric we examine is market valuation we strive to align our most intensive interventions in areas with the healthiest real estate markets and so monthly polls of multiple listing service data allow us to closely monitor market trajectories and establish benchmarks for data sources like the MLS listings and sales data we're constantly working to refine our tools for accessing these data we've begun developing Python tools to automatically convert the archaic formats of their standardized reports in the map and analysis ready formats we can of course extract other data from MLS reports to assess market health such as days on market averages or comparative market volumes to better understand our neighborhoods gathering historic mls data also allows us to gain a richer profile into our current and future inventory the mls holds a great deal of data about listing such as bedroom counts foundation types porch types and roofing material since neighborhoods change so quickly and our inventory is so expansive we often struggle to create accurate forecasts for our long-term resource needs one of the most nifty tools we have is a citywide demolition probability analysis drawing upon a diverse slate of 49 administrative data sets including building permits white complaints motorcity mapping condition data and sales history our team develop up to a logistic regression function by which we can predict the probability that a future hypothetical structural inspection will find that the property needs to be demolished at the ninety-five percent confidence interval this allows us to predict future needs given our current and future inventory Detroit's neighborhoods are changing in every way at such a breakneck pace it can be difficult to accurately understand the up-to-the-minute condition in trajectory of neighborhoods there's a notion in quantum mechanics that we can't see where a particle is only where it has been since at the rate particles are moving they've moved by the time we have completed our observation I think the same holds true for neighborhoods in some ways neighborhood metrics change rapidly and just about all of our data are lagging indicators and give us a lens into what the neighborhood looked like one month one quarter or one year ago these types of statistical analyses help us get out in front of these issues and can help us shift from reactive work to proactive if not preventive work ultimately the best way to handle blight is to do prevent it from happening since most of our data is administrative data from local government partners we constantly struggle to glean concrete information from incomplete inconsistent and contradictory data one struggle we've had is to gain a nuanced understanding of occupancy since any single metric available to us is rather flawed for example our Motor City mapping occupancy data tends to give us false positives for occupancy when neighbors maintain vacant homes nearby along the same lines our utility data gives us false negatives for occupancy when residents obtain illegal power hookups to get around this issue we've expanded on a powerful tool developed for us by our wonderful partners at data-driven Detroit we've created a vacancy index drawing on five datasets gas water accounts water service postal delivery motor city mapping and the valassis shopping news to construct a 10-point index giving us a more nuanced to look into property occupancy we found that aggregating the tricky a municipal data set allows us to get around some of the shortcomings and limitations of the individual files the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts that's it if you want to follow up with me about anything I said shoot me an email or give me a call there are a few things I love more than talking about cadastral data my communications team would have my hide if I don't make one final plug if you want to follow some of our further forthcoming future analysis efforts follow the land bank on facebook and twitter at the links on this slide Robert thank you we have had a number of questions come in while you were speaking and as I mentioned at the beginning we're going to wait to the end and take them all then but there are some great questions in the queue already and thank you i am absolutely blown away by the fact that you are soon going to own one out of every four properties i think you said in the city that's um that's incredible and so we are now going to hear from michael SRAM michael is director of information technology and research at the Cuyahoga land bank where he developed the land bank property tracking system called the property profile system this information technology tool helps the corporation use data to make strategic acquisition decisions as well as truck property statuses from acquisition to demolition and then on to disposition so Michael you can take it from here thank you thank you all for having me my name is mike schramm I'm with the Cuyahoga land bank and you know I'm going to really talk about first of all can I advance the slides yes I can information systems for land banking and I'm going to really divide this into like three parts really i'm going to four parts i'm going to introduce our land bank then i'm going to talk about a project that were we're totally involved in with Case Western Reserve universities neighborhoods stable stabilization team database which is you know combining all the administrative data similar to to what they're doing in Detroit and using that to make to make decisions I'm going to talk about our property profile system which is what we use for our day-to-day tracking of all our land banking activities and and is very you know has a lot of the same features as what Detroit is using in their sales force system about you know automating tasks and things like that and I'm going to talk about strategically how we can use some data to make some acquisition decisions here in the context of how tax foreclosure works in Ohio versus how tax foreclosure works in Michigan where you know they are sitting on one of four properties in the city and it's it's you know do and you know we're obviously sitting on a much smaller inventory and it's you know size of cities issues but it's also differently than how tax foreclosure works across state boundaries on other answer questions in like 10 minutes so we have a mission to strategically acquire properties return them to productive use reduce flight increase property values support community goals improve the quality of life for residents we are a government purposed quasi-governmental nonprofit corporation so we are actually a lot of government but we were created by the county government we are a standalone independent corporation we actually have a 70 million dollar of funds that we get from collected penalty and interest on collected property taxes we have government land banking powers but we're also in a private enterprise so we can have a lot of wear a lot more transact about when it comes to making decisions and and gut franco's who is our president he wrote all all of the ohio county land realization corporation language and he often speaks to the three major engines of land banking ohio which is the statutory funding which allows us to plan budget maintain a professional staff the expedited tax foreclosure process which is basically in ohio we had a judicial tax foreclosure process but now we have an expedited administrative tax foreclosure process for vacant and abandoned properties and then putting the government powers into a private nonprofit corporation to allow for a high level of transactional capacity we've been open since june of 2009 and we are approaching our 6,000 parcel square and we've we basically disposed 1700 we've demolished 4,000 that disposition number is wrong I'm going to have to get back to you on that one we have demolished over 4,000 we have facilitated almost 1200 renovations and we're currently managing or have managed 82 million dollars in grants and really our land bank acts as more of a transactional land bank where we are doing property triage we are basically bringing properties in through bank re owes deed in lieu of foreclosure HUD Fannie Mae and tax foreclosure and state forfeiture and we're triaging them we're visiting every single property to determine is this a candidate for renovation is as a candidate for demolition is this a candidate for a side yard program and really the one of the major differences from how we work from how some of the other land banks work is Ohio has actually had municipal passive land banks since the late 70s so when we do our thing if we do not have an immediate end user the properties then transfer to our local municipal passive land banks for long term holding maintenance so we're we're very transactional um so we use to data systems one is the neo can do Neighborhood Stabilization team database as a planning tool and nsp mashes together various public data sources for planning and outreach and then we use our property profile system in the two systems through AP is actually talk to each other so that when we create a record in PPS when when a property comes to it onto our radar we have all that information that's in the nst that's that's been collected over at the University and then our information flows back into the NSD so Neighborhood Stabilization web app it's maintained by Case Western Reserve University it is utilized by Cleveland Community Development Corporation's our city and county government and the land bank and other sort of nonprofit partners and government partners and then the land bank has built specialized tools and variables on top of entity data to to basically bring things together and really the the rationale of NFC is all this government information exists in silos there's got to be a better way so let's put it all together into one sort of rhys resource that that's you know queryable interactable mappable downloadable has geographically referenced information and it's updated weekly so that we you know robber talk about how neighborhoods are always changing blade is constantly changing and therefore a database that's constantly updating is needed and it's really this community driven assets that we have core funders but we have partners in you know in neighborhood community velopment groups that are helping to drive what data goes in there how the data is calculated and how things are sort of put together and contains County information you know from from from auditor we call it a fiscal officer building a housing data we're working on getting utility data from Cleveland quater foreclosure information sheriff's information tioga land bank information for raised community development information and we had also using the the semaphore US Postal Service data that we're updating in there and then various we actually also did a love an entire Cleveland serve a similar to what they did interest rate and actually that you just went into the NFC yesterday all hundred sixty thousand parcels that an organization called the thriving communities Institute working with Loveland put that into put it into the infirm did an entire city wide survey and where you know Robert talked about the fact that no one data set tells an accurate picture of vacancy or in the case of vacant lot you know your your auditor data which is used for calculating taxes not only updates once a year as far as the land use code goes and and you know we have more up-to-date information on demolition from building and housing and from the land bank so that's basically um you know creating a more accurate proxy for for vacant lot or a more accurate proxy for probable vacancy looking at many sources and the foreclosure process occurs across many offices so you need to look at the data and figure out who has the latest record to sort of come up with what we call our destabilization indicator so that's the nst the property profile system is our cloud-based application that is where all of the activities related to our land bank live and it's a situation where our operations drove the development of the technology rather than trying to fit our operations into some sort of technological cookie cutter box we upload data or we enter data once we upload photos once and then they get plugged into wherever it is needed and is accessible to everyone and we develop them it so there's web forms for data entry and tracking all of our documents are done or most of our documents are you know doc generated dynamically pro see orders inspection reports deeds you know photos are in their notes are in there there are separate logins and modules for our various contractors inspectors and then there's data validation so that you know you don't you're not tearing down to the structure that's being remodeled or rehab renovating a structure that's being demolished and you know building in all sorts of mrs. rules so certain processes that violate our programs and policies do not occur the ability to export create reports and like I said because the the local data in our case from neo can do and the nst is integrated in our local geographies and target areas when a parcel is created we know it's in an ni p target area we have automated schedule data processing alerts cracking contractors emails being dynamically or scheduled generated and it's just a lot of a lot of different aspects of our operations are in there so here's an example on the left you see a an entry a web form for data entry and then it produces an inspection report PDF that can then be shared with the community or demolition specifications are pre-loaded can be edited and then turn into a document all of our property maintenance and grass cutting is automatically scheduled through the system and you know right now we're actually in the world of of developing and sharing this technology with with several other land banks that are out there and you know we we basically we want them to be successful and have the same technology that's available to us because it's so important that land banks are maintaining their inventory knowing their inventory and you know not making any mistakes because we want them to be accountable because the you know the better off all land banks are the better off things are so now I'm going to sort of talk about a project we do because we're merging our neo can do data with our property profile data into a tool called that we call the aggregator and really how it's used to recommend tax foreclosure candidate to our county treasurer for tax foreclosure that are suitable to come into the Cayuga land bank and so all of this data we've classified into various tiers so there's data this in public control there's data
that's about to you in control the public there's data that can be cleared for productive use and then there are other vacant and blighted structures and if you create if you basically classify the data across all the sources into these various tiers and then you can dynamically dissolve the boundaries you can actually find these land aggregations that are sort of suitable for for additional resources of tax foreclosure or nuisance abatement or something like that so that you can create redevelop spaces and so tax foreclosure is our largest source of properties they are done on a case-by-case basis house bill 294 is the administrative fast-track tax foreclosure for bacon and banned in properties and you know right now there's more than 20,000 tax foreclosure eligible properties in the county that aren't already in foreclosure in the county has resources to file to start 4,000 new cases per year which candidates are more are the most desirable for land bank so we you know in order to be eligible for house till 294 tax foreclosure it first has to pass the vacancy and abandonment test so let's and the other thing is is that properties that go through tax foreclosure that don't go to land banks that don't get sold in a sheriff's auction then end up in this state forfeiture limbo in which court costs are not paid and our precious limited tax foreclosure resources are wasted so we want to get the biggest bang for our buck for text foreclosures so the first filter are those things using those proxies for vacancy to figure out what hours of vacant tax delinquent text foreclosure eligible properties then the second filter are what are the properties that land banks don't want and then the third filter is water properties that land bank once so you have things that are in various target areas things that are in tipping point neighborhoods where there's a potential for a renovation or a resale or if you demolish the worst house on the street as Robert said they can see is contagious and if you have a tipping point neighborhood or a stable neighborhood and you have that terrible house and you tear down that terrible house or renovate that terrible house you've made all the difference in the world for stemming the tide for that neighborhood but the last factor is what are those tax delinquent properties that are already adjacent to publicly owned properties so that these land aggregations can grow and that's sort of what we're doing when we are making recommendations to our County on where they should be prioritizing their tax foreclosure candidates so that's my story I'm sticking to it and now it's time to open up for question Michael thank you and I really appreciated the slide that had all of the various data sources that you were pulling from and pulling all of that into a central repository I think that's certainly something that we try and do here and I think it is a challenge that everyone places particularly as all of data sources are now available for people to access so we do have a lot of questions that have come in and i think what i will do is start with one where actually multiple people ask the same question it is a question for and it is how did you get access to the mls we get access to the mls through the mls comp reports that any realtor can poll and so you can pull a complete record of mls listings for a certain geography over a specified time frame and so we typically will pull all sales are all listings in the city you know for 2012 or 2015 etc and then through that create sort of a longitudinal data set thank you there's another question that is a few people asked this zachary romano and brian nagging dara and it is for both of you and it's basically asking how much time and money did it take to develop your platforms and what is your estimate the lawn going costs run and maintain what you have you want to go brother robert or his should i go first either way I'm happy to I'll you start because I think you guys have do a lot more development although okay so so so basically in the world of neo can do and the nst that's been an ongoing project that has basically been funded through philanthropy and contracts with various government agencies to keep that going and that property data budget for gluing all of that information together and having all those resources and doing all that property data outreach and and maintaining and adding to that platform the university's the research center basically has to basically fundraise about 150 thousand dollars in a given year plus or minus a you know but that's all you know there's a lot of other sort of projects that are that are property database there as far as the property profile system you know we we basically been developing that and building on that on and off since 2010 the first version was released in 2011 and basically it's been you know a portion of my salary for you know five years and then probably another half person that we have here and in the last year we've you know we basically start over from scratch rewriting what we call our PP s 2 point 0 which is a you know this product that we're going to be using and then you know the other land banks are using and and you know if you're interested in in in licensing that you know you can you can contact me direct me to basically get the licensing costs and all of that and then in Detroit I think the story might be relatively similar I mean truthfully the only person who would have a perfect insight now the costs i think we probably be our CFO but roughly we had sort of on initial build out of salesforce was about a quarter million dollars and then subsequently we have one full-time admin and one sort of part-time support Salesforce admin as well as the sort of ongoing licensing costs but I I think a big hurdle for us was that the data in Detroit was so hard to come by and in such just uh just absolutely you know blighted a condition that it took a lot you know a long time for us to get everything to a state where it was ready for this type of platform and just as a comment or as a cheesy commercial where much less than that quarter of a million dollars in our in our product but their product does do you know I mean you know ours is the the Cadillac and there's the Bentley so um you know it's it's it's order of magnitude as well for somebody who's handling 100,000 parcels thank you our next question is from shantanu sing and it is a question for a Rob for Motor City mapping how many people did you need for the survey project we heard it was in the hundreds sure well given the sort of time frame set out by the blight task force the Motor City mapping survey was had a very short window in total they did it in about five and a half six weeks and so they used a hundred and fifty surveyors that said you know there were sort of previous iterations of Motor City mapping which used a much smaller staff just for a longer time frame great the next question is for both of you and Mike if you want to go first on this and then Rob that's great it's from Shoshanna Aikens and the question is Philadelphia recently instituted at land bank but because of council manic prerogative council persons need to approve all actions in their area there has been little action and little faith in advancement I have either of you run across these types of political issues and one out what are some lessons learned you know I mean in order to be effective a land bank needs to basically make its own decisions and no its inventory and have professionals working for it so that is the various people know that that you know the the inspections that we're doing the decisions that we're making our the rate decisions and having those pictures and that inspection data you know that's readily accessible through through our through our property profile system that lets us know everything we've done to that property somebody will say why are you tearing that down it's a beautiful brick structure and then all of a sudden you know you show data and pictures that says yes but that's you know all the other houses on that street are boarded and you look inside in the pictures the basement is all moldy and there's you know three feet of water in the basement and then if you look at from the back there's a hole in the roof you know if it basically by being professionals by having our data all lined up it has instilled a level of trust and confidence into our various stakeholders and you know there are people who who think there are things that we we we demolish that we shouldn't but at the same time if we can bring data to that conversation and show that you know for the experts we know what we're doing that allows us to to to maintain that sort of public confidence yeah I guess I'd really echo all of Mike's comments I think really a transparency and sort of openness and sort of creating a large stream of maps and reports for all of our sort of uh political folks has really helped instill I think a good level of confidence in our work I think also that since the scale of our operations is really much larger than Detroit has ever seen before I think most sort of uh politico's are pretty excited just to you know I'll see the progress you know we're demolishing so you know several fold more houses each year than our sort of historic averages we're selling 10 times more side lots each year than the city did historically and were you know cleaning up vacant properties we know 10 or 20 fold faster than historic means well and our partners because our data is flowing back into n st and and all of our you know council people have access to that and all of our community development corporations have access to it they're basically knowing things that are going to get posted on our website you know three to six weeks before they get posted on our website as far as you know the disposition for a property or if a property is coming to us so it is that transparency but really helped out and our next question is from Carter Wang and the question is the use of technology in this field has got to be lightyears ahead of where it was a few years ago how do you guys see this moving forward are there technologies that you see being used in this space in the next few years that you guys aren't using now Carter you should be asking the Detroit guy about his prediction model because Carter works for me works at their poverty center okay so unless there's multiple Carter Wang's out there but I figured that was going to be Carter's question you know i think it's it's a I'm going to put on my history hat here and you know you think about unfortunately so many technological revolutions came out of World War two for example I don't know i watch The History Channel and you know there has never been anything like the blight being caused that you know that as part of you know the great recession of the late 2000s and I think the technology had to basically be there and developed and you know the resources got put into Detroit and the resources are getting put into cleveland in you know in in terms of tens of millions of dollars for for demolition and you know I think scale brings evolution I don't know if I'm getting too philosophical here nobody's laughing because nobody I can't see the audience members but I don't know thank you okay Rob do you want to comment on that I think the very sort of similarly I'm not sure if I'm really the best person to talk to since I feel like Detroit has been playing such a game of catch-up the last few years I mean three years ago all of Detroit's public ownership and demolition and everything else was done on sort of uh error-filled Excel spreadsheets sitting on you know old computers and so we've come long way but I still feel like we have longer to go I think long-term at least locally the future is gonna sort of i think i think the future will really sort of center around a predictive analytics i think ultimately we're finding that that's really the only way to sort of get out front of these issues thank you our next question is from yvette homes and the question is our properties preserved for affordable housing or for those of just certain income levels and I think perhaps it's a question for both of you I guess in Detroit we definitely work with a lot of partners to sort of help spur affordable housing development we one of our largest sort of disposition programs is to our nonprofit partner program by which we sell a great deal of homes to CDC's and other sort of semi public agencies to do affordable housing development we don't do any ourselves but we also really don't do housing development we really focus on selling property to other agencies and you know in a similar way we are working with a lot of nonprofit community development groups the Cleveland housing network Habitat for Humanity who are sort of in the affordable housing space but at the same time one of our most successful renovation program is called our deed in escrow program in which you know we do sell houses they do have our renovation specifications they're sold at highly incentivized prices and we supervised the renovation by private individuals who are either going to be owner occupants or investors the deed stays in escrow while the improvements are made we inspect every 30 days to make sure our spec is is being you know the house is being brought up to our spec and at the same time it's really a sort of a sweat equity model in ways because a lot of the people are doing the work themselves and you know it may be a 30 thousand dollar renovation for four if you were paying contractor prices but you know people are getting them done much cheaper still pulling permits still getting certificates of occupancy and you know we're checking on them you know it's a it's a you know four month process where we're inspecting every 30 days and you know it you know it builds equity we have a program that offers discounts to recent college graduates and to vet the veterans and you know so those are other ways to sort of build equity thank you we have a couple of questions from amanda wilson and she is in kansas city where they're also developing a data dashboard and she was wondering how extensively the tools that you've described today are used by community members or people outside of your organization's so you know there is a public version of of neo can do that's out there for general community members nst is more of community partners but a lot of the active CDC's that have block clubs are sharing a lot of that Neil can do n SD data with you know block Club leaders and things like that and sort of you know in sort of a grassroots II way if the community development group does have an active organizing outreach arm you know are once a property comes into our inventory and the decisions as far as which which direction it's going is made you know it gets posted to our website from the land bank side and so you know we are putting data out there and it is being used at various community levels I think our sales force itself is not yet a fully public facing platform although that's certainly coming we rely more on the city's open data portal to do a lot of our dashboards and sort of summary reporting all which is free of course the city also has a weekly dashboard it sends to residents or anyone who signs up for it that sort of automatically fed by sales force as far as the sort of analysis that's most of what I was working on or most what I'm showing we use sort of a mixture of open source and uh you know fee-for-service software packages namely ArcGIS but also QGIS we use our Minitab sequel server my sequel and so I think we've sort of developed a suite of software packages that are based on the sort of preferences of the individual analysts but if we were you know looking for free versions we could certainly do all of our work with open source software thank you I was going to try and squeeze in a few more questions but I see that it's now we are almost at the end of our hour so everyone that did type in a question please know that we will be getting back to you with answers so I would like to thank both of our speakers very much and I hope that everyone has found this session to be very useful please remember that we will be
this webinar has been recorded and we will be posting it to WP policy-map calm / map chats and we'll also be sending it out by email to all of the attendees you'll also receive a survey which we would love to have you fill out letting us know what you thought of this session and if there's any topics that you'd like us to cover in 2016 we are trying to figure out the variety of topics that we'd like to introduce our next one which is happening early 2016 will be on measuring the need for quality childcare and we will post an announcement about that before the end of the year sometime in December and lastly I just wanted to take a moment because again i need to my staff would kill me if I didn't do this but I want to make sure you know that at policy-map we also have a data and mapping application that while it does not contain all the kinds of very very cool local data that we saw presented today we do have some similar vacancy home sale data and trend data that may be of use to you and if you have not trialed policy-map i would highly recommend going to policy-map calm and checking it out there is a fairly robust free version of the tool as well as a subscriber version and we're obviously here for any questions or demos if you're interested so again I just wanted to thank you very much for your time and we will get back to you with answers to all of your questions thanks Rob thanks Mike thank you thank you
