Real estate sales dashboard unveiled

Auditor announces launch of the Lake County Real Estate Sales Dashboard

Lake County Auditor Christopher A . Galloway recently announced the launch of the Lake County Real Estate Sales Da shboa rd in pa r t ner sh ip with the county’s Geographic Information System Depar tment.

“As part of our continuing efforts to increase transparency, I am pleased to introduce our first real property dashboard,” Galloway said. “This (resource) allows real estate professionals and the public access to the sales transactions of Lake County real estate, tangible information they can use.”

In addition, the tools available allow for comparing current sales versus past years sales data — currently back to 2018.

Users can also compare sales data year over year and by community, school district, and/or neighborhood.

“Forget Zillow (the online real estate database company), this is Zillow on steroids. If you want to look up how home sales are doing in your neighborhood, you can get real data, dates and numbers, not estimates, right here in Lake County.” — Lake County Auditor Christopher A. Galloway

“We are making both residential and commercial sales data available on the dashboard,” Galloway said. “Forget Zillow (the online real estate database company), this is Zillow on steroids. If you want to look up how home sales are doing in your neighborhood , you can get real data , dates and numbers, not estimates, right here in Lake County.”

As the dashboard develops, suggestions in usability will be heeded with possible tweaks made, Galloway added.

“This tool will help educate people to see what’s going on in their community,” he said. “And for elected officials, we’re going to encourage them to look at their wards, cities, and townships, and track where their numbers are going within their own building departments.”

Jim Branch, director of the Lake County GIS Department, said using the latest tools to provide relevant information is exciting.

“I believe these dashboards allow local government to be more transparent and can offer valuable insights that might other w ise be d if f ic u lt to see in the raw data,” Branch added. “We are pleased to work with the Lake County Auditor’s Office on developing userf r iend ly int er fa c e and data sets for the public. That is part of our mission in the Lake County GIS Department.”

Links to the dashboard are available through the auditor’s website, Lake GIS website and the Lake County Auditor’s Property search site.

“In the near future we will be rolling out additional dashboards that will allow the public to analyze property tax rates — individually, not a generalization of residents — and valuation histories on Lake County real estate,” Galloway said, adding development of greater transparency and accessibility for the public remains a priority his office and the GIS department will continue to pursue.

“We’re working on that right now,” he said. “These are the things I promised, things I said I’d work on when I got appointed and we’re doing it. More data, more transparency, those are good things. I think people are going to like this. I know the realtors are excited about this.”

Galloway