With Curbwise, OWH makes smart use of housing valuation data

At the end of May, the Omaha World-Herald introduced the Omaha metro, specifically Douglas County, to Curbwise, a site said to help users understand property valuations. As June marks the start of tax valuation season, this site has refined public data and Census information from the Douglas County Assessor office and created a new way…

Curbwise, a featured page of DataOmaha.com, focuses on giving property owners a better understanding of their home values and neighborhood real estate trends.

At the end of May, the Omaha World-Herald introduced the Omaha metro, specifically Douglas County, to Curbwise, a site said to help users understand property valuations. As June marks the start of tax valuation season, this site has refined public data and Census information from the Douglas County Assessor’s office and created a new way for metro property owners to understand the metrics of real estate in their neighborhoods.

Curbwise is a featured page on Data Omaha, the World-Herald microsite that launched in September as a way to house public information, experiment with visualizing data sets and bring another element to the newsroom. Data Omaha was built outside of the World-Herald’s current content management system, SAXOTECH, and built in Django, which gives its creators more flexibility for featured pages like Curbwise. (For more information on Data Omaha, see our post: “DataOmaha.com: Interview with World-Herald reporter Matt Wynn.”)

Comparing the Douglas County Assessor’s site, left, with Curbwise, right. Screenshots from respective sites.

Earlier this week, we spoke with Matt Wynn, a watchdog reporter and developer for the World-Herald, who answered questions about the service Curbwise provides to the Omaha area, how the newspaper reaches out to inform property owners on protesting valuation decisions and the revenue model behind its custom reports. Answers from Wynn, edited for length, are below.

Curbside is collective project brought together by the efforts of Wynn, World-Herald online editor Ben Vankat and reporter Paul Goodsell. Prior to the launch of Curbwise, the World-Herald utilized housing databases on omaha.com/section/homes.

Silicon Prairie News: How would you best explain Curbwise?

Matt Wynn: What we tried to do was give a better idea of real estate and property taxes.

We tried to build a site that breaks down – real estate sales trends, comparable sales, property taxes, all that sort of stuff – all the home value in a way that makes sense to actually make these rather complex topics accessible and understandable.

SPN: How did this idea come about?

Wynn: I work with Paul Goodsell, who has been [at the Omaha World-Herald] since the 1980s and he’s been covering tax assessments the entire time.

In past years, the Assessor will change significant percentage of all the properties in Douglas county and he will raise their values and people understandably get hot about that … So poor Paul every year would take umpteenth dozen of phone calls from people just wanting to understand their situation and how this works because they had no way to do it. And, to his credit he would talk to them all, walking them through it all.

Basically, we took the conversations Paul has every year with a dozen hundred homeowners and tried to turn it into a website.

SPN: Aside from the county’s website were there any other ways to access this information? 

Wynn: No, and I really should give credit to the County here. Their site houses a lot of information but it’s not terribly intuitive … but, they were really open to sharing all their information with us and they gave it to us. So no, I don’t think there was anything else like this. I don’t think anything like this has been done really anywhere.

SPN: How does Curbwise complement the work of the Omaha World-Herald? 

Wynn: Two parts – first part, one thing I really like about this paper and where I’m at now is that when it came to justifying this all we needed to do was pitch the journalistic aspect. “Hey, this will help people understand the thorny issues” – that was all we needed to do and we had the green light to go ahead and build this thing … pure journalistic value.

People can assess the basic stuff, poke around in their neighborhood and they can collect all the information they need to put together a strong protest, but then we tacked on the custom report option. Where for every house, we will run an algorithm and generate your best argument. If you really want to protest your valuation, here’s the best way to go about doing it. So, we did that. We hooked up a little PayPal system where you can pay $20 and get your report generated.

SPN: How is the reception so far? 

Wynn: Since about two Fridays ago, my back of the envelope calculations on content that is related to this stuff to sales and housing pages, we’ve increased page views 5 times over. As for sales, it’s been pretty successful. We’ve done things in the past to generate monstrous traffic, where we measured success with unique page views. With Curbside, our raw traffic numbers are not there. But, its sustained. Since launch we’ve been pretty steady on traffic. And there’s the customer report angle, where this site is worth more in raw dollars than a typical news angle. 

SPN: Can you talk about how the site is structured? 

Wynn: As for the breakdown, if its focused on taxes which it is right now: how do you break this down to people and how do you make this easy for them to understand? We take calls from people all the time like, “My house is valued for X, that’s ridiculous the guy down the street just bought his house for some much lower price” … Well, we’ve got all the information. We can look at that sale, we can look at all the other sales and we can say, you’re right, or no, you are not right. And it’s all about having that information in front of us and knowing how to do that. We wanted to make that information accessible to everybody. And, I think we achieved that here.

We made it so you can go to any house, type in any address and get the information on just one click. You can see all the surrounding valuations and how they’ve changed from year to year… We also allow you to quickly see how on a square foot basis your valuation compares to other people, which is huge. That’s been really difficult to accomplish until now. You had to be able to click through all the houses in your neighborhood on the County’s website, grab the square footage, grab the valuation and on your own time place the value. 

Here, you can also look at the sales, and again at a glance how the actual market compares to the Assessor’s best guess of what your local market is… You get a really good understanding of what’s going on.

SPN: Could you describe the process of data collection for the site? 

Wynn: Our database is neighborhoods, which we built ourselves. So the one thing came from us, the neighborhood. The rest was all public information which we had to obtain, clean and analyze, and we turned this information into a handful of databases.

We had boundaries [for neighborhoods] that we had in mind and took the information from public record, used spatial data bases of parcels to assign each record to an actual location in the city. And then, we assigned each of those data points to one of our shapefiles. That’s how we ended up with our average sales, average assessments, those things.

The neighborhoods we’ve created allow for someone to pass through the latitude and longitude and return back the specific set of neighborhood information. We built this API: curbwise.com/our-api. We also made the neighborhood shapefile available and a PostGIS database, both which are free for download.

SPN: On the Assessor’s site users can search by owner name. Are there plans to include this search feature on Curbwise? (answered via email)

Wynn: It’s a sign of how ambitious our timeline was – if something wasn’t imperative to our goal, we left it out. We just figured that, with what Curbwise is right now, the ability to search for a house by owner name doesn’t really suit our purpose. We exist to help people wrap their heads around the difficult concepts involved in tax valuations. That means contextualizing a bunch of information in terms of geography and history. To allow a search by owner name doesn’t really accomplish our goal in any meaningful way, it’s just neat.

We will probably add it eventually. But with the speed we were trying to launch, it really became an issue of that information being stored in a table that we really don’t expose to the search. Doable? Sure, but just enough of a headache to justify putting it off.

For more information on Curbwise, visit curbwise.com

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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