Park Records: Translation without Standardization

Yep, a lot of us have been there. You’ve scoured the internet hoping to find that one property platform that provides the golden ticket of mobile home park information.

After multiple tries, out of nowhere, you think you’ve found it! You quickly sign up and pay for your new subscription.

Logging in for the first time, you eagerly search for mobile home park information like a kid searching for his Christmas day presents.

But wait a minute! It’s the same wrong information the last real estate site had! What the heck?

Well, I’m going to tell you the secrets that traditional real estate platforms don’t want you to know.

While the exact details behind the curtains are fairly complex, I’m going to try to keep it as general as possible. This way everyone can start to understand exactly why reliable mobile home park information is so hard to come by even when you spend $5k or $10k a year for it.

County Records

Most of the real estate information that you see on traditional subscription based real estate platforms, actually originates from county property records. This is where a lot of the problems start with mobile home park information.

Diversity is a big part of what we all love about mobile home parks but for county assessors, diversity can be a record-keeping nightmare. In simple terms, mobile home parks don’t fit well into county records because their data systems have been largely structured to house traditional property records. Think of it like the 90/10 rule.

No, it doesn’t mean the diversity of a mobile home park makes it impossible for an assessor to record the property. Afterall, every mobile home park owner, and each of the mobile home owners, all manage to receive their property tax statements. It just means, depending on the county's system and assessor, each of the roughly 3,200 counties and parishes will have their own unique way of entering the park's records

You see because of the way county government is structured, county assessors aren’t concerned with data consistency between other counties. They’re only concerned with record consistency as it relates to “like” properties within their own county.

That’s because, from a legal aspect, their responsibility lies solely with the county they were elected to serve. Part of that responsibility is to equalize, determine, and defend the assessed value of each property within their county.

Generally speaking, this means as long as a property’s information has been recorded in a consistent manner with other “like” properties within their county, they have the ability to carry out their responsibilities. Even when niche properties may be recorded in a completely inconsistent manner compared to a neighboring county.

Data Warehouses

As an example, Nebraska has 93 counties. Approximately 60% of those 93 counties utilize one specific software vendor to record and house its digital property records. Even today this vendor relies on an old flat file data storage system.

Meanwhile, the other 40% of counties in Nebraska utilize other various software vendors and data storage platforms.

For a real estate platform to display the property records for Nebraska, it would have to write code that is specific to each county’s vendor and technology. Unfortunately, Nebraska isn’t the exception to this digital mayhem, it’s the norm.

This is where data warehouses come in. To accomplish this, data warehouses first obtain each real estate property record directly from each county. Then before the records can be served to real estate platforms, specific algorithms called Translators, are written for each county to convert the unique records into a standardized record set.

To truly appreciate the complexity, consider the last time you attempted to export your digital records from one platform to another. On the first attempt, you probably experience error messages. To correct this, you spent time manually manipulating your data so that it conformed to the new platform’s requirements.

Translators are written to automatically perform the same type of data manipulation between platforms, just on a much larger scale.

But just like human translators, not every translation is perfect. As an example, a property’s record can suddenly have important leading or trailing zeros omitted in a field that may be critical in tying related records together. Meanwhile, names may continue to contain abbreviations that a county assessor originally intended only for the county’s reference.

As an example, within the name field of a property owner, you may see the actual owner’s name appended with “C/O” and then another name.

Trying to pragmatically decipher a single entry like “John Smith C/O John Taylor” within millions of records is nearly impossible without some form of standardization at the original source (the county record).

Setting aside mobile home parks, in all honesty, it’s amazing the system works as well as it does. But just like counties, that’s because data warehouses also focus on accurately standardizing the largest majority of traditional real estate records rather than trying to perfectly accommodate niche properties like mobile home parks.

Escaping Data Insanity

Hopefully, by now you’re starting to gain a pretty good understanding of why traditionally it has been hard to find reliable mobile home park information. As information consumers, we often fall under the illusion that if we just keep trying different real estate property platforms, one of them is bound to supply exactly what we are looking for.

It’s only after bouncing from platform to platform do we suddenly realize that we have just spent a lot of money to see the same poor information on multiple sites. This makes sense because they all rely on the same methods and data warehouses to provide their users the real estate information.

The only real difference is the asset class a platform may focus on, and the number of data layers they choose to provide to their users.

With ParkSitesIO we didn’t take the easy route of simply writing a few lines of code to display mobile home parks from within a data warehouse. We also don’t rely on scraping information from other sources.

Both of these methods only serve to regurgitate the missing and inaccurate information we’re all accustomed to.

Instead, our verified mobile home park and RV park records are housed within our very own proprietary system.

As the old saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result". Unfortunately, as an industry, we’ve been doing just that for decades when it comes to acquiring mobile home park information. However, ParkSitesIO is looking to help our industry escape the insanity.