Dunedin City Council

Dunedin City Council building a reputation with sound data

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The thousands of decisions Dunedin City Council makes every year are supported by accurate property data. Terralink’s property data is helping the Council cut down on process and waiting times.

Challenge: Making informed decisions

Dunedin City Council’s Land Information Team Leader, Rob Garrett, believes one of the most important roles of councils is to be the custodians of the most up-to-date data on their communities.

“Residents come to the Council requesting all sorts of information about the community and many of their requests are about property data. For example, if a person is considering buying or selling a property they want to know the rateable value of the property, or if a property owner wants to renovate or subdivide they come to us

“It also works the other way, where we need to notify residents of our plans in a particular area and we need to make sure we have notified everyone who may be affected. All these requests are about sourcing data.”

Mr Garrett says accuracy of the data is the key.

“We don’t want to be in a situation where we have to revisit a decision because we haven’t considered all the facts and notified all those affected. But it’s a huge challenge for us to maintain the quality of the data we need and to integrate it across our systems.

“We don’t always have the internal resources available to independently research and maintain the data so we need to turn to external sources,” Mr Garrett says.

Solution: Completing the picture

“Terralink International’s Terraview Platinum completes the picture for us and ensures we’re making decisions based on all the data available. With Terraview Platinum we can view data on any part of Dunedin and any area outside of the region. And, if there are areas of our data that are missing or out of date we can use Terraview Platinum to fill in the gaps.

“We know we’re working with a more complete dataset than other sources so our efficiency is increased because we don’t have to spend time pulling together different sets of data from multiple sources in different formats and trying to marry them up,” he says.

Mr Garrett says his team uses Terraview Platinum to check property ownership and details of the exact boundaries of properties as well as legal information on properties.

The data has multiple uses for us like helping to set rates, check who has title on a property we’d like to purchase or sell, and the evaluation of land cover and land surveys,” he says.

Business benefit: Confidence from constituents

Mr Garrett says the higher the quality of data, the more integrity it has which in turn results in better decisions.

“This quality is important not only for the sake of the community but also for our reputation as an organisation.

“Without the community’s support we can’t run this city. Making good decisions gives people confidence in us and what we’re doing and knowing that this will work in their favour generates respect and confidence in us,” Mr Garrett says.