A new website is making it more transparent and easier for area citizens to look up information about properties throughout Muskingum County.

In addition to faster speeds and mobile-friendly access, the site makes available data and tools that weren’t online before.

Muskingum County Auditor Debra Nye said the company who ran the old website recently got bought out and it gave them the opportunity to make the website better, which had been in use for over ten years.

The new website, operated by a company called ISSG, also runs the county’s real estate software. Many counties use the Ohio-based company.

“The beauty of that is the information housed in our real estate software is going to be populated correctly right into our website,” said Nye. “The old system would do a nightly extract whereas now the website will populate it directly from our data.”

On the site, users can look up properties by their parcel number, owner name or address. If they are unsure of that information, there is an intuitive map that makes it easy to click on a parcel and find its corresponding information.

Unlike the old website, which had long load times and was inaccessible on mobile devices, the new one loads quickly and can be accessed by smartphones.

“The mobile use is very friendly, very easy to use, so you can be in your car and be able to pull over and pull up any parcel in the county,” Nye explained. “You can find out a lot of information about a particular parcel or neighborhood.”

That information includes when the parcel was last sold, to who it was sold, for how much it was sold as well as many other pieces of data.

Since the site is run by the same company that operates the Auditor’s Office software, Nye added, they have full administrative control as opposed to a third party. An example she gave is that when new bills are passed in the state, their website can reflect the changes locally as soon as the next morning.

During the soft launch of the new website, local realtors, surveyors and appraisers gave their feedback, which According to Nye, led to multiple enhancements to the site.

The website also now includes the ability to lookup manufactured homes as well as both commercial and industrial parcels, all features not previously available on the old site.

Tax Estimator, a feature on the site, allows residents to look up the effect of new proposed levies on their total tax bill.

Levy Distribution, another feature, allows taxpayers to see where and to which levies their property taxes go.

“It’s very transparent so you know where every dollar goes,” Nye said about the application.

As the new site was being developed, Nye worked to ensure that datasets available to her team that weren’t previously available to the public, due to the inability of the old site, were accessible with the new one.

Many of those features are incorporated into the mapping application of the site.

Want to visibility see the parcels sold in the past three years? There’s a way to do that. Want to see where FEMA Flood Zones are in Muskingum County, that’s included as well. So is the location of every school building, airport, rail line, utility line (such as water and sewer), zoning (for those townships that have them) to the areas of dense tree coverage and where rivers or creeks traverse through.

The site is considered by many who use it regularly ‘leaps and bounds’ above its predecessor.

“We’re very excited about it,” said Nye as she walked through all the newly added features. More are expected in the near future.