Revaluator 1.8: a new interface, Ask Revaluator, property record and sketch editing, and the Layer Catalog

Revaluator LLC today released Revaluator 1.8, the largest update to the platform since its introduction and the release in which Revaluator becomes, by name and by scope, a valuation platform: the field work, the property record, the sketch, the map, the valuation studies and the review all in one place, all on a staging copy of the county's data, with nothing written to a live CAMA system until a reviewer approves it.

A new face, one icon language

Every screen has been redrawn. Revaluator now carries its own icon set — more than a hundred and thirty glyphs in a single thin, modern family — in place of the mixed library symbols that had accumulated over five years of releases. One concept is one icon everywhere: the same delete, the same refresh, the same open, on the map bar, the parcel callout, the analytics tabs and the record editor alike, and every one recolours correctly under the light and dark themes. Every button carries a tip that names what it does and what it acts on, so a new user learns the screen from the screen. The toolbars themselves have been unified onto one control family across the map, the analytics tabs and the record editor, with the same behaviour for a spinner, a checkbox or a dropdown wherever it appears.

Ask Revaluator

The release introduces Ask Revaluator, an assistant that docks beside the map and works the same screens the user does. Ask it to find the vacant lots in a subdivision and it queries the county's own data, keeps the answer as a named set and draws it on the map. Ask it for a picture of a parcel and it reads the drive-by video, works out which camera faced the house and at what distance, and shows the best frames. It can lasso, bundle, assign, add a layer from the catalog, run comparable sales, load the sandbox and solve it, set the criteria on a ratio study, and edit a property record — describing the parcel first, asking which card when it matters, refusing a code the county does not use.

Three rules govern it. It calls the application's own code — the button's handler, never a copy of it — so an action taken by asking is identical to the same action taken by clicking. It has exactly the rights of the person signed in, resolved from that user's roles, and it says so when a request is outside them. And it works only on the same staging copy as everything else: no assistant edit reaches a system of record except through the same validation, change log and line-by-line review as a hand edit. A county can withhold the assistant from any role, grant it to a few people, or leave it switched off altogether; the rest of the platform is unchanged without it. Voice input and a per-user chat history that can be read back or deleted complete the panel.

The property record, editable

Where a CAMA system publishes a full extract, Revaluator 1.8 opens the property record as an editor. A read-only band shows the basics; beneath it appear only the sections that can be changed — dwellings, additions, outbuildings, commercial sections and land — and within them only the columns the county actually uses. Every dropdown is the county's own code table. Cards and lines can be added or removed; new construction and percent complete are first-class. Every dollar column stays locked, by design: the editor corrects what the record says, never what it is worth.

Field checks are learned from the county's own data rather than hard-coded — an unknown code, a value outside the range the county has ever stored, a wrong type — and are advisory, marked in the county's warning and error colours, never blocking. Each change is highlighted where it was made, logged with who, when and on which machine, stored on the county server as a delta against the source, and kept when a fresh extract arrives. Edits travel with an offline bundle and come back with it. In Parcel Review an approver accepts or rejects each change on its own line; accepting the field work while rejecting one line item is a normal outcome, not an exception.

Sketches, drawn and written back

The record editor includes a sketch editor that reads the CAMA's own vector strings — rectangles, diagonals, bows, ovals — and writes them back in the same grammar. In a validation run over one county's building file it reproduced the recorded area on 100 percent of 435,618 residential outlines. On the canvas, dragging a wall stretches its neighbours; dragging a corner turns the walls diagonal; a ring handle bends a wall into an arc; a tapped wall takes a typed length. A floating drawing palette that docks to any edge carries select, draw, rectangle, oval and curve tools plus duplicate, flip, rotate, split and straighten, and works with a finger, a pen or a mouse. Area and perimeter recompute as the shape changes and are checked against the area on record.

Sales chasing, and the studies around it

Valuation Analytics gains a Sales Chasing tab implementing the tests in the IAAO Standard on Ratio Studies. The hold-out test compares sales before the valuation date, which the appraiser could see, with sales after it, which could not have been chased, by median, dispersion, the share within five percent of the median and a Mann-Whitney comparison. The strata test breaks the ratios by price band, age, size, class and vacant or improved. A sold-versus-unsold test runs once a prior roll is on file; the platform now keeps a slim snapshot of every roll it sees so that comparison is available from the next cycle onward. A county row comes first, then every neighbourhood with a plain-language verdict.

Every layer in one grid, every source in one catalog

The Layer Manager has been rebuilt as a single grid grouped by kind — overlays, status maps, county layers, imagery and services — where the list is the draw order and the tools follow the row selected: opacity, styling, information, data browsing, zoom, rebuild. A layer switched off stays pickable, so a parcel can still be tapped with its outline hidden. Every new layer arrives switched off, and layer preferences are saved per user per county and applied before a layer ever reaches the map.

New layers come from the Layer Catalog: a browsable, searchable list of what the county's own GIS server, the state's portals and ArcGIS Online publish, each item marked as available by link, by download, or both. A link uses the service where it lives; a download brings the file into the county's folder so it keeps working offline and is flagged when the publisher changes it. Each state ships with its portals seeded — in North Carolina, NC OneMap, the Department of Transportation and the historic-preservation and archaeology data of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources — and any ArcGIS server, ArcGIS Online organisation, Hub site, feed, download page or folder can be added as a source by pasting its address. Features on a linked service are clickable on the map, with the publisher's own popup fields. The basemap is now a setting per county and per user, including the county's offline package.

The parcel report

More Information on any parcel now builds a single report page: identity and outline, values and roll history, every building card with its cost chain and a drawn sketch, land lines, sales, permits, field visits, photos, field work in Revaluator, neighbourhood sales and links. It prints, saves as PDF and opens in a browser. Every county gets the page; a full CAMA extract adds the cost chain and the sketches.

Roles and permissions

Security moves from three fixed flags to roles and permissions. Every feature in the platform is a permission grouped by area; six built-in roles — Super Admin, County Admin, Reviewer, Appraiser, Video and AI — cover the usual shapes of an office, and a county can define its own. Existing users keep exactly the rights they had. The Users & Roles manager shows users on top and roles with their permissions beneath, with effective permissions per user and the role that provides each one; licence keys can be set per user. The assistant carries the same permission keys as the buttons it drives, which closes the door on using it to reach a tool a role does not grant.

Availability

Revaluator 1.8 is available now to licensed counties. The property record editor, sketch editor and the deep valuation tools apply where the county's CAMA system publishes a full extract; 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.