Your home's history on-line

Until recently searching property records held by council could only be described as a tad laborious; now you could almost describe it as fun - and many thousands of people are using it.

In the past wanting to check the history of a property - your own or one you are considering for buying - has meant taking time off work, heading to the council offices, requesting the property file either in hard copy or on the reception computer, deciding what is important and purchasing photo copies, or making copious notes. Now you can get all the publicly available records on a property at home on your laptop.

Hastings District Council staff are rapt at the way their new on-line record service is working – not only is the public taking to using it in droves, but it has won a top award in the Association of Local Government Information Management awards. It was praised for its innovation, “huge uptake of public users” and “modest budget”.

By typing in an address, users can find out almost everything, from all the legal descriptions, land area, valuations, and what day the rubbish is picked up, to the annual rate cost and all the publically available documents.

The latter can include original drawings, permits for things like log burners and home alterations, subdivision records, and swimming pool inspection records.

There are over 1,000,000 individual documents in the council’s property record system, nearly all of which are available on line. A few older records have not been captured and any confidential information is not available.

The work to digitise all records was started in 2003, always with a view to being able to supply them on-line.

A trial with a handful of people from industries most likely to use the option started in January, with the numbers increased over the ensuing months as small improvements were made.

Now it is fully operational and the response has been phenomenal. 

In June and July more than 10,000 documents had been viewed on-line.

One early trialist said: “I am not sure that I need to provide any further feedback other than a wonderful tool – implement it immediately. We have used it extensively already”. 

“The use of the facility has been above and beyond our earlier expectations, showing just how much the use of technology is growing in the property and property related industries,” said Corporate and Customer Services general manager Mike Maguire.

When the on-line project was first investigated, it seemed the cost could be well over $80,000, however by using in-house systems and staff, the project had a final cost of less than $6000.

The on-line document search followed on from the introduction of other on-line services, including dog registration which had dealt with almost half of all transactions this year.

4 October 2017

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