New Property Comparisons Introduced On Grafton Assessor Site

After two weeks of beta testing, the Grafton Assessor's Website lit up Tuesday with a revamp that includes easier property comparisons for homeowners planning tax appeals.  A new mapping feature shows recent neighborhood sales for any inputted property.

"We've been working on this since June," said Grafton Assessor Bill Ottley.  The old setup wasn't easy enough to use, he said, especially after he happened to look at a state-of-the-art one in Naperville's Lisle Township.  "The company wanted $15,000 for that one," said Ottley.  That was too pricey he said so he networked a little and came up with a programmer at NIU who'd written an app for finding student bus locations in real time.  "He only wanted $5,000 to do our properties program," said Ottley.

The new Grafton property research site is here:

http://www.graftontownship.us/dnn/Assessor/PropertySearch.aspx

Residents will need to read the instructions carefully, but with the new system it's possible to call up any residence and then, by clicking, info about the property, its history, it's assessment history and recent nearby sales.  That last is a big improvement over the previous regime in which comparables for tax appeals had to be culled by hand.

"This is, basically, an electronic version of our property record card," said Deputy Assessor John Collier, even including pictures of each home and a floor plan, although not all of those are up yet.  "There are 21,000 and we have to put them in by hand," said Collier.

In the pic: Deputy Assessor John Collier shows how to make property comparisons on Grafton's revamped Assessor's website.