Revaluator 1.8.0.5: its own map engine, built-in directions, LiDAR in 3D, a new Parcel Review and county-defined field statuses

Revaluator LLC today released Revaluator 1.8.0.5, the third update since Revaluator 1.8 and the one in which the platform takes ownership of its own map. The map, driving directions, the offline basemap and address search now run on Revaluator’s own engine and free public data, with no separate GIS runtime required. Around that foundation the release adds LiDAR point clouds and elevation as ordinary map layers, thematic maps of the whole county, a Dataset Manager for the county’s own spreadsheets, field statuses each county defines for itself, a rebuilt Parcel Review, sharper parcel cards, and a considerably more capable Ask Revaluator. As before, all of it works on a staging copy of the county’s data, and nothing reaches a live CAMA system until a reviewer approves it.

The map, on Revaluator’s own engine

The map is now drawn by Revaluator’s own renderer, built on the open-source MapLibre engine, by default. Parcels, selections, the callout, bundle status maps, document markers, layers, the GPS position and the assistant work exactly as before, and the parcel map data has been rebuilt so the map draws faster. The Esri renderer remains available as a per-user choice, and if the chosen renderer cannot start on a computer the map opens with the other one and says so; the map always opens.

Imagery with labels, the basemap every county starts on, now shows NC OneMap’s 6-inch aerial photography with street, neighbourhood, town and water names drawn cleanly on top. Each basemap can now come from more than one public provider, so an office can switch to another source in a moment, and the street and grey styles have been redrawn. An offline map of the whole state, aerial imagery with labels, is built into the program, with no separate package to download. The address search places its pin on the rooftop through NC OneMap’s address service and uses the US Census geocoder elsewhere, all through free public services with nothing metered. Every layer now carries its own Show from scale, so a bundle, a status map or a county layer can stay on screen at any zoom, and Zoom To works on every kind of layer, even one switched off.

Directions on a built-in road map

Directions, Best Route and turn-by-turn guidance now run on a road map of the whole state built into the program from OpenStreetMap, online or off, on either renderer. The turn list reads as a person would write it (“Turn right on Sunglow Dr”, “Arrive at 123 Main St, on the right”), and a navigation strip over the map shows the next instruction, the stop being driven to, and the miles and minutes left, with Follow, Voice, Skip Stop and End. A route that starts outside the state begins at the nearest road in it. Counties that hold an ArcGIS licence can still choose Esri’s offline package or online routing service; the county’s own ArcGIS key is now a county setting. Esri products are licensed by Esri directly, and Revaluator works fully without them.

LiDAR and elevation as layers

The state’s LiDAR flights are now layers like any other. The Layer Catalog lists the public point clouds over the county from USGS 3DEP and NOAA Digital Coast, each with its flight date, point count and coverage; added as a link, a cloud streams from the web with nothing downloaded. Ticked on, it paints over the map coloured by elevation. A 3D view opens beside the map, or on a parcel’s own tab, with the parcel boundary standing on the ground, and measures distance, height, area, elevation and the height of any point above the ground beneath it, in feet, by mouse, finger or pen. For North Carolina counties the catalog also offers NC Emergency Management’s 2024 countywide elevation models and its LiDAR-derived building footprints.

Any elevation raster can be drawn as hillshade, an elevation ramp or shaded relief, and every parcel can be mapped by elevation or slope read live from the model. Ask Revaluator can open a parcel in 3D and answer from what it sees, always naming the flight date, and can run a structure check: the property record, the point cloud and a building footprint layer compared parcel by parcel, flagging possible new structures, additions and removals, with permits issued since the flight listed as the likely explanation. Counts and heights are reliable; areas are reported as a range.

Thematic maps

Map by… colours every parcel in the county by a value or a code, with a legend and a count per class: assessed value, land value per acre, building value per heated square foot, sale price, the assessment ratio on the ratio study’s own qualified sales, class, neighbourhood, zoning, year built, grade and more, plus the percent change in value against any earlier roll, which is a revaluation at a glance. Values are read fresh at every paint, so a map is never stale.

The county’s own data

A new Dataset Manager imports a spreadsheet or CSV and ties its rows to parcels by parcel number, address or coordinates, showing the match rate before anything is saved. Files keyed by ZIP code, census tract or block group, such as house price indexes and census tables, apply to every parcel in the area. Datasets appear in the parcel report, on thematic maps and in the assistant’s answers, and can be shared with the office or kept private. The Layer Catalog adds national public datasets fetched for the county (Overture building footprints with heights, and USDA soils), accepts file geodatabases as layer files, and gives each county a shared list of catalog sources kept in its own settings.

Field statuses defined by the county

The statuses a parcel can hold in a bundle are now a county setting: one list and one set of colours for the whole office. An administrator can rename, recolour, reorder or switch off statuses and add the county’s own. Each status also carries what it means to the program, such as where new work starts or what a reviewer’s verdict sets, so a county’s workflow is configured rather than coded. Every county begins with the statuses and colours it uses today, and existing records keep their status.

Parcel Review, built for the reviewer

Parcel Review is now organised as the reviewer’s queue. Work is grouped by bundle, each showing how many parcels are finished and how many record edits await a decision, and a bundle’s parcels load only when it is opened, so the screen comes up quickly on the largest category. For each parcel the reviewer sees what is new since it was last reviewed or closed — status changes, pictures, card markups, documents and property record edits — with who made each change and when. Record edits are approved or rejected line by line, the parcel is marked approved or sent back in place, and the next parcel in the bundle comes up by itself.

Parcel cards

The parcel card markup pad now shows each card at its true shape and full width, drawn at the size it is viewed so it stays crisp when zoomed, and opens a long card in a fraction of a second. Undo and redo cover every stroke, label and clear. A marked-up card exports and prints with the markup placed on the card’s own pages at print quality. Where a county’s CAMA extract is available and no card is on file, the full parcel report is laid out as the card — values, buildings with their sketches, sales, permits and photos — ready to mark up.

In the field

Revaluator now finds a GPS receiver on its own and names the device rather than a port number. During GPS video playback the vehicle moves smoothly along the road between readings, and jumping through the video lands on the exact moment a parcel was passed. From that video, Ask Revaluator can photograph a whole bundle: it finds the best moment for each house, straightens the picture and crops it to the building, and presents every result in a review grid where each photo is accepted, rejected, edited or retaken. Nothing is saved to a parcel until a person accepts it.

Ask Revaluator

The assistant now measures against any layer on the map: frontage walked along the parcel’s own boundary, adjoining parcels and the length they share, distance to the nearest feature, and the share of a parcel inside a flood zone or district. It draws what it measured on a scratch layer the user can keep as a layer or discard. It can apply one record edit across many parcels, previewing the change and asking on screen before anything is written; it accepts pictures and data files in the conversation; and it works from the parcels selected on the map. Record edits made through the assistant carry a stamp identifying the conversation, so a reviewer can tell them from a hand edit. The Property Record and the parcel report now open in milliseconds; the Property Record shows the date of the extract it was read from and when the record last changed in the CAMA system, and a county can lay out which fields are shown, editable, required and reviewed in a spreadsheet and import it.

Availability

Revaluator 1.8.0.5 is available now to licensed counties through the program’s own updater. The first start after the update rebuilds the local parcel map data once, in the background. Features that read a CAMA extract apply where the county’s system publishes one; Ask Revaluator is enabled per county and per role. Counties that would like the release, or a walkthrough against their own data, should contact the Revaluator team.