Hood County officials have the lay of the county at their fingertips, using software that shows aerial photographs of any building in their jurisdiction from multiple angles.


How It Works
The Hood County Appraisal District purchased Pictometry software under a license agreement allowing it to share the data with the Fire, Police, Sheriff's and Public Works departments.

Jeff Law, chief appraiser of the Hood County Appraisal District, said the software's multi-angle imagery is especially useful in defending property value appraisals when property owners protest value increases to avoid higher taxes. Law's staff uses the software to show citizens specifically what about their property's physical status causes its value increase.

Pictometry produces multi-angle views of all the properties in a county by taking photographs from an airplane, blanketing the entire county with a crisscross pattern of flight. Hood County is largely a rural area, so Law asked for more populated regions to be photographed at 2,500 feet, which yielded more photo angles, and more rural parts of the county photographed from 5,000 feet. Naturally there was a price difference.

"When you get into those rural parts of the community, you may not necessarily get 12 views of every building," Law said. "You might get three; you might get four -- four is probably the average."

Law initially receives an image from Pictometry as raw photography without any property lines on it. He overlays the county's geographic information systems (GIS) data over it, which inserts all of the property line identifications.

"It will allow us to do simple queries on properties," Law said. "So depending on what information you have underlying in the GIS database, using the query feature, when I click on a house or a property, it tells me the account number of that property. I can then go to another database where I keep all of my appraisal information, and I can look up the information."

Law also can click on any street in a photograph and get the street name.


Being the 'Bad Guys'
Before using the software, Hood County frequently based its appraisals partly on snapshots of properties, photographed from the street since many homeowners refused to allow appraisers on their property.

"We would inform the taxpayer, 'If you don't allow us to take actual measurements, we're going to stand back from the road and estimate. We may be wrong or right,'" Law said. "We're not the most welcomed individuals. When we show up, there's a possibility that your taxes will go up. Unfortunately we have a job to do, and we're just trying to do the best we can."

Law said the software evens the playing field because it gives most property owners the same exposure to appraisers.

The visual access the software provides increases county revenue because appraisers can see new developments to a property they couldn't see from the street.

"We can use Pictometry in those older subdivisions to look into backyards to see if there are any add-ons, swimming pools, new buildings or anything like that that might add value and change our opinion of the appraised value," Law said.

Soon after implementing the software, one of Law's appraisers discovered several docks on lake property in Granbury that had been difficult to detect from the street.

"[The appraiser] went through a few subdivisions and picked up more than $1.5 million in value just in things like boat docks and swimming pools that had never been put on the tax roll," Law said. "I was surprised he picked up that much stuff in such a short period of time."


Wiggle Room
The software gives appraisers measurements of all properties, as well as the distances