About the Customer:
Land Services SA (LSSA) was appointed in October 2017 as the exclusive service provider to the South Australian Government for a range of transactional land services and property valuation services previously delivered through the Lands Titles Office and State Valuation Office.
As a trusted partner of the State, LSSA deliver high value, trusted services to the community, being recognised for creating innovative solutions. LSSA offer a range of property transaction and valuation services, property information products, custom data sets and reliable market insights including:
Customer Challenge:
In 2021 LSSA identified an opportunity to develop a searchable database of sales data to assist in finding sales evidence to support valuation reports for use by property industry professionals. There were several existing solutions in the market, but none were fit-for-purpose. The most used solution at the time, due to its customised search capability, was a 30-year-old piece of software that needed to be installed on a desktop PC and required manual weekly data updates, placing the onus one the user to keep the data current. The other main challenge for the industry was accuracy of sales data given South Australian regulations allow self-reporting of sales information resulting in data sets often carrying zero-dollar sales making it difficult to provide accurate valuations, especially for unique properties or areas with low sales volumes.
Partner Solution:
LSSA took their vision to Relational Data Systems (RDS), and in late 2021, Property Edge was conceived. Property Edge is a born in the cloud, property research platform powered by source-of-truth data from the South Australian Government Land Registry, designed to provide property professionals with a one-stop shop for all their property information needs.
RDS collaborated with LSSA to architect, build and the deploy the platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Property Edge was built for speed, ease of use and included integrated tools for users to build highly customised property data searches and reports with AWS cloud infrastructure being an enabler of these key requirements. RDS continues to provide application support services and develop new functionality for Property Edge, keeping it current and the mainstay for property professionals in South Australia.
Each working day Property Edge is updated with more than 1,000 property dealings. This includes property transfers and mortgage discharges through to subdivisions and new titles. Any event or transaction relating to a property in South Australia will be captured and stored in AWS.
The AWS environment simplifies the development and support of AWS cloud-native applications like Property Edge and allows the RDS team to efficiently implement enhancements such as:
Aerial Imagery Integration
Working with LSSA’s aerial imagery partner, RDS enhanced the imagery API to enable satellite imagery fallback where no high-resolution data is available and allow images to be embedded in appraisal reports.
Mapping Functions
New interactive utility to select properties by drawing polygons on the map view. The industry had been asking for this update and LSSA delivered with the help of RDS and AWS.
External Datasets
Enriching Property Edge data easily with external datasets such as High School and Primary School zones has been well received by the industry. RDS has built this capability into the platform to enable LSSA to add more data points as they become available, keeping Property Edge current and an invaluable tool for the property industry.
Below are the AWS Technologies RDS has used to deliver new feature enhancements and capabilities:
Results and Benefits:
Property Edge was created by the passionate team at RDS who saw that LSSA’s property data, which is the basis for all existing property research platforms, could be made readily accessible to industry to facilitate better decision-making, promote transparency, and contribute to growth, in a broad range of industry and services, across South Australia.
Property Edge allows South Australian property professionals to access, understand and analyse property data. RDS built the platform with direct input from local users, and we continue to implement upgrades based on user requests.
About the Partner:
At Relational Data Systems, we specialise in establishing and managing client cloud platforms for business-critical applications. Since 2020, our AWS SysOps team has expanded to over 20 AWS certified specialists delivering high-quality, secure solutions for property, survey, planning, land administration, valuation, and utilities clients.
In delivering our managed services, we place a particular focus on:
As part of our managed service offering, RDS put a strong focus on quality and security and have developed a Quality and Information Security Management System (QISMS) that provides assurance for our services and solutions. The QISMS is externally audited annually and certified against the ISO9001 Quality Management and ISO27001 Information Security Management standards.
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