Property Data Entry Guidelines

September 24, 2013

You can also use Zillow or Trulia (or others) to identify and enter a set of addresses. These sites will not have all the variables in the template but it might be easier to identify your set of address locations on one of these sites and then find the additional details from the County website later.  Here are some links:

NEW: I recorded a screen capture video that might help you use Zillow as a short-cut to the county property database. Click here to see the video. 

Is this helpful? Let me know in the comments section.

http://www.co.pueblo.co.us/cgi-bin/webatrbroker.wsc/savesession.p?dept=404100

http://www.zillow.com

http://www.trulia.com

Excel template for data entry: http://busad265.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=168

When entering the data variables for your 30 selected properties, please note the following:

1. Only include Single Family residential homes. Do NOT include mobile homes, duplexes, multi-family residential (4-plex, apartment building, etc), commercial properties (retail, office, medical, industrial, etc.), non-profit buildings (e.g., schools, churches) or publicly owned property (e.g., government buildings, parks).  If in doubt, use Google Maps Street View (or similar) to try to determine whether the property appears to be a single family home.

2. If you can not determine one of the variables then enter 0 (if the variable is numeric, like square footage or number of rooms) or enter NA (if the variable is text, like Style or Construction).

3. Try to spread out your selection of properties so that they’re not too clustered in one location within the neighborhood. For some neighborhoods this may not be possible. Just do the best you can.

4. Try to select properties with different values. In most neighborhoods there will be expensive properties and inexpensive properties. Get some of each.  This will help you later when you want your model to have the flexibility to determine approximate home values for various home types.

5. Be sure to save a copy of your 30 property data records! Even if you have uploaded the data to the Google Drive spreadsheet please save your 30 properties locally or in your own cloud folder location as a back up. We don’t want to repeat work if Google Drive doesn’t work well for so many shared users. Click here for an Excel template.