LA County to share new assessments platform with other California counties
The Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor announced Thursday it’s completed a six-year modernization effort with the software firm Oracle to move from paper-based property assessments to a digital model. The office also announced it plans to open its platform to other California counties.
The assessor’s office sought to speed up the the assessments and appraisals of the hundreds of thousands of properties it reviews every year, relinquishing county staff from referencing 40-year-old manuals to maintain the office’s legacy mainframe system. The office, the largest county assessor’s office in the country, appraises more than $1.7 trillion in real estate annually and generates more than $17 billion in property tax revenue for Los Angeles County’s government.
More than a century’s worth of real-estate data stored in multiple file rooms made case reviews highly inefficient, Scott Thornberry, the office’s director of operations, noted in the announcement. And one-off implementations in the office’s legacy platform made enterprise improvements time-consuming, he said.
The office chose Oracle to launch the project in 2015, migrating more than 100 software and hardware systems to the cloud by February 2021. The final phase of the project aims to permanently retire the office’s legacy applications and switch on Oracle applications, including chatbots.
The modernization project required to the county to update its online assessor portal, which residents and city staff use to access records, maps, property photos and property-tax history. But the new platform reduced the time it takes to process property data in half, to just four hours, and also includes disaster-recovery backups.
