Valuation - 2012-10-16
By: John Cirincione, SRA
The toolbar, favorite bar and history tabs of an appraiser’s computer typically are overrun by website lists and links that have grown too large and too cumbersome to be of any practical use. That was the situation Marc Kushner, Associate member, found with his computer. Kushner, a commercial appraiser and senior associate at Miller Cicero LLC in New York, developed Informed Appraiser (www.informedappraiser.com) as a way to organize important websites. The result: an easy-to-navigate, specialized database where appraisers and other real estate professionals can find relevant online sources for market data and other information.
The site has more than 40 categories for such resources as maps, mapping and GIS; cap rates; market reports, statistics, analysis and commentary; rental information; and sales listings and transactions. Each category typically contains multiple sources; maps, mapping and GIS, for example, currently lists more than 35 websites under subcategories, including aerial imagery, street maps, historical maps, flood maps and parcel maps, among others. Informed Appraiser also identifies whether referring websites require a membership or a fee, so there’s no wasted time hunting for the fine print.
Once a user specifies their location, search results are returned with four categories for each site:
Users also have the ability to submit site recommendations that, once approved, are added to the database. In fact, that's how the site continues to grow. Informed Appraiser went live in 2009 as an empty vessel that quickly was populated by user-submitted content.
Check out Informed Appraiser to see how useful a tool it can be. The site is free, but registration is required.