Lexington, KY - Though one of the few Property Valuation Administrators in Kentucky to have any sort of property records available online, the Fayette County PVA is launching its new website that builds on the interactivity and usability of its outgoing site.
On the existing website once an address was searched and viewed on a map, users could not click to see values of neighboring properties without starting a new search. But on the new site, currently in beta testing at http://www.fayette-pva.com, the user now has the ability to take a virtual walk down a street of property value data.
"People buying and selling houses use this site a lot," Fayette PVA David O'Neill said. "I can't imagine trying to buy or sell a house in Lexington and not using the PVA website, so I thought it was a feature that would be really useful from that standpoint."
The old site is still accessible at http://www.fayettepva.com and will be until around Thanksgiving, O'Neill said at which point both URLs will bring up the new site. In the meantime he encourages all regular users of the site to work on the new version.
O'Neill said he wanted to update the abilities of the site even though this type of data isn't available in many Kentucky counties at any level of sophistication online.
"There are a significant number of counties that are not computerized, but a lot more counties that are not on the internet," he said.
But the current site that has been online since around 2004 and went through a slight facelift in 2007, just didn't do all he felt it should for the people that use the site regularly and even only occasionally.
"I'm big on open government and open source data," he said. "The more data that's available to the public, the better use it is for economic development and business leaders to make decisions. I know that the site is very heavily used by realtors, builders, appraiser, mortgage bankers and the business community. Hopefully we're making their job easier... if we make it a little bit easier to identify data that they're looking for so they can better market their products, I think that we all benefit from that."
The new site has a quick search function at the top of the home page to allow users to skip the number of clicks the old site made people looking for property information hit. It also provides unique URLs for all searches so a link can be sent or saved. On the old site, there was no URL that could be sent, and search terms would have to be reentered by whoever wanted to access a record.
O'Neill said he hopes the citizens of Fayette County will use the site if for nothing else to make sure the data on any of they're property is correct and up to date.
"We're shooting for fair and equitable, we're not authorized to go in your house, so it's in your best interest to make sure we're as accurate as possible so that we can be as fair and equitable as possible," he said. "In the long haul it is in everybody's best interest for the data to be as accurate as possible."