New technology aids McCracken County PVA in evaluating homes

MCCRACKEN COUNTY, Ky. — The McCracken County Property Valuation Administrator's Office is now using a 360-degree camera, called an InstaPro 360 Pro 2, mounted to one of its cars to gather street photos of houses. According to McCracken PVA Bill Dunn, this technology will make gathering the photos quicker as well as cheaper and more accurate. 

Before getting this technology, the McCracken County PVA had to take individual photos of each house it evaluated. Dunn said it could take the office weeks to finish photos for a neighborhood. With this technology, it takes about an hour. 

"In the past, we haven't always had the street level photography. We would have to go out and take a photo of every house in person and we just can't do that. This will let us do a whole neighborhood in, say, an hour," said Dunn. 

Previously, the office had paid another company to take the photos, but it cost $83,000. This camera and its gear only cost $5,500.

"A few years ago, we had another company do this for us for quite a bit of money and we found out with this camera we can put it on top of our car and do the work our self and save tens of thousands of dollars," said Dunn. 

Though it is more time consuming for the office, Dunn said the new technology is worth it. 

"When we bring the photography back to the office, then I have to start a processing process and then I have to upload it after that, so it's a little bit more time consuming on our part but it's, it's well worth our time," said Dunn.

Dunn added that the device also aids those who use aerial photos to evaluate properties. 

"When they're going through their list of properties they inspect, they will look at the Google street view photos that we have taken just a few days before or couple weeks before, maybe, and they'll look at those while they're looking at their aerial photos checking to make sure our property records are correct," said Dunn.