A public property portal, launched 2021
Our work · Government

County property data, finally searchable.

Hamilton County's Auditor's Office is where the county's property data lives. It ran on a legacy, PDF-driven system that was hard to navigate and harder to keep current, and the county had no internal capacity to modernize it. We built a public, mobile-friendly portal that puts parcel research in anyone's hands, delivered on a fixed bid and launched in late 2021. The county has run and maintained it themselves ever since.

A public, mobile-friendly property-data portalReplaced a legacy PDF-driven systemFixed bid; launched late 2021
01 The problem

The property records lived in a legacy PDF system.

The Hamilton County Auditor's Office manages the county's property data, the parcel records residents and professionals look up every day. That data had grown up inside a legacy, PDF-driven system, extended piece by piece over the years until it was slow to navigate and built on technology no one wanted to keep maintaining.

The county's IT team knew it needed to be modernized, but didn't have the internal capacity to rebuild it and still hit the timeline. So they went looking for a software partner who could take on the whole job: turn that tangle into a clean, public portal, then hand it back for the county to run on its own.

I had a strong idea of the product we needed to build, but I was pleasantly surprised when the [Counterpart] team came back with even better ideas of how to reach our goals. With Counterpart, all the bases are always covered.

Diana Cleland · Web Administrator, Hamilton County
02 What we built

A public portal, and an engine behind it.

We rebuilt the property data into a modern portal with two sides: a public search anyone can use, and an admin side the county's own staff run, all designed to be handed over and maintained without us.

Public

Parcel research, open to all

A public search that lets residents and professionals look up county property data directly, without a phone call or a records request.

Any device

Mobile-friendly by default

The portal works on a phone as well as a desktop, so parcel research is a few taps away wherever someone happens to be.

Data

A modern property database

We rebuilt the county's property data out of the old PDF-driven approach and into a clean, current structure the portal reads from.

Admin

An admin side for staff

County staff manage and keep the data current through an admin interface built for the people who run the office day to day.

Documents

PDF generation

Server-side PDF generation for the property documents residents and professionals still need on paper, produced straight from the live data.

Ownership

Built for the county to run

The whole system was designed to be handed off, so the county could host it and maintain it with its own team once we delivered.

03 Under the hood

Proven technology, chosen on purpose.

Almost everything we ship runs on the same modern Microsoft stack: proven, supported, and easy to hire for years from now. Cutting edge but never bleeding edge.

.NETC#SQL ServerWeb API

A public search anyone can use sits on top of an admin side for county staff, with server-side PDF generation for the documents residents and professionals still need on paper.

04 The long run

Built to hand off, and county-run since 2021.

Some of our systems we run for years. This one we built for the county to own. We delivered the portal on a fixed bid, then handed over a system the county's own team could host and maintain without us. It has done exactly that since it launched in late 2021.

Launched 2021
and county-run ever since
Launched 2021
and self-hosted by the county ever since
Fixed bid
scoped and committed before the build
Public
parcel research open to anyone, on any device
1 portal
replacing a legacy PDF-driven system
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