A single house can generate an astonishing amount of information — the title, boundaries, access points, consents, easements — and it gets even more complex when you add apartment blocks and commercial buildings.
Not only is the amount of data overwhelming, but it’s kept across a wide range of platforms by all types of different government agencies, councils, and businesses. Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) chief digital officer Aaron Jordan says storing data across multiple platforms can create major issues.
“In the aftermath of the Canterbury quakes, we had a lot of learnings. One was that information about properties was all over the place, which caused a bunch of problems. There were multiple addresses for a single building, which meant buildings were searched multiple times — that caused unnecessary risk. Then during recovery, there were problems with insurance aspects of properties, particularly with things like shared walls, multiple insurers, renters, and owners in the mix. The list goes on and on.”
To try to solve some of those problems, the team at LINZ decided to work towards bringing all the most relevant information together in one place. It began with a conceptual ‘desktop’ framework of how official property information was linked. That framework developed over six years before LINZ decided to investigate whether it could be digitised.
“About four years ago I was handed this project,” says Aaron. “We wanted to take the conceptual model and see if it could work. I knew Datacom had this capability because I’d worked with the team on various other pieces of work. I knew the more people we had in that mindset, the better the interactions would be. We needed to work well together if we wanted to take it out of policy thinking and into technology thinking.”
They began with test data and a prototype tool, eventually coming up with the first version of what would eventually become the connected property data management system (CPDMS) known as Property Explorer. Previously dispersed and disparate property information is now in one place, linked accurately and displayed clearly.
“We call it the property spine, which sits at the heart of the CPDMS, where users can bring together information seamlessly — that’s the gold nugget,” Aaron says. “It looks at council-owned, Crown, and private land, and it even helps in resolving ownership issues with moveable boundaries like braided rivers and coastlines.”
As soon as it went to user testing, Property Explorer was rapidly recognised as a major step up in how LINZ delivers property information.
“From the early days of the experiment we had lots of positive feedback from within LINZ, from local councils, Earthquake Commission, and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.”
Lawyers, and the local councils currently using it, are particularly happy with how it correlates rating units with property titles, considerably reducing confusion during property transactions. So far 17 territorial authorities (TAs) are using Property Explorer, with the remaining 50 in the process of signing up and supplying their data. By March 2022, Aaron hopes to have every TA signed up, which will be a red-letter day for teams at both LINZ and Datacom.
“It’s been a long journey and there’s a lot more work to do, but we’ve learned a lot,” says Aaron. “Once we get all of the TAs on board there will be a bit of a celebration. In the meantime, we do have a smile on our face, because the system is proving its value straight out of the gate, which is satisfying. We’re confident in where we’re going.”
To build this successful solution for LINZ, Datacom Business Manager Sam Haines says the team depended heavily on large data processing and heavy computing activities.
"For this we used AWS to provide a stable, scalable and reliable platform with data storage that is both easy to manage and upgrade. By using Lambda for serverless computing it enabled us to move a lot of the heavy processing activities off the application servers, which resulted in cost savings, greater reliability and less risk of downtime for LINZ's core services. Processing emails through Simple Email Service (SES) is also making it easier for users to import property files sent by email."
