Daniel Anderson - Mobile Assessor and the Power of Technology

The Lock-In Problem We Don't Talk About Enough

There's a conversation happening in hotel lobbies and conference halls across our industry that rarely makes it into official presentations. It's about the quiet frustration of working with systems that hold your data hostage, data that your taxpayers funded, that your staff collected, and that your constituents have a right to access.

Daniel Anderson's journey from field appraiser to software innovator illuminates a fundamental challenge in our profession: the technological constraints we accept as normal are often artificial barriers created by vendors, not inherent limitations of the work itself.

When Paper Clips Become Shackles

"These assessors are collecting taxes, they're hiring a vendor and then some of these vendors will lock up images and the sketches and the property data and they make it very difficult for innovators to get into the market and compete," Anderson observed during our conversation at IAAO 2023.

This isn't just about vendor lock-in, it's about the downstream effects on your operations. When your sketch data is encrypted in one system, your property photos trapped in another, and your valuation models siloed in a third, you're not running an assessment office. You're managing a digital archipelago where each island speaks its own language.

The practical implications are staggering. Need to switch sketch vendors? Prepare to re-sketch every property. Want to integrate aerial imagery with your CAMA system? Better hope both vendors play nice. Looking to adopt new AI-powered error detection tools? Good luck if your current provider won't share the data format.

The Hidden Cost of "Everything From Us"

Anderson's advice cuts straight to the heart of the matter: "If someone's best at tax, if someone else is best at CAMA, if someone else is best at mobile, if someone else is best at sketch, hopefully you can work with them all. And if one of them saying no, you have to get everything from us, I personally would run."

This isn't vendor bashing, it's about recognizing that no single company excels at everything. The assessor who insists on using the best tool for each job isn't being difficult; they're being responsible with taxpayer resources.

Consider the opportunity cost. While you're struggling to export data from a locked system, your neighboring jurisdiction with open standards is already testing machine learning models for error detection. They're comparing CAMA records against aerial imagery to find demolished buildings that still appear on the tax roll. They're automatically flagging properties where the exterior wall material in the photos doesn't match the property record.

From Clipboard to Cloud: The Evolution Continues

Anderson's story, starting as a 15-year-old college student who became a field appraiser at 18, mirrors the profession's own evolution. He built Mobile Assessor not as a product to sell, but as a solution to his own inefficiencies. "Three and a half inch floppy disk in my camera... very inefficient," he recalled of his early days.

The iPad's arrival in 2010 changed everything. Suddenly, the technology existed to solve real problems: optimize travel routes, eliminate redundant data entry, timestamp photos automatically. But here's the crucial part: Anderson built his synchronization service to be database agnostic. It could talk to AS/400, Informix, Oracle, SQL, whatever system an office already used.

This philosophy, meet assessors where they are, not where you want them to be, should be the industry standard. Instead, too many of us have accepted the opposite: reshaping our workflows to fit vendor limitations rather than demanding tools that fit our actual needs.

The Promise of True Integration

What could we accomplish with genuinely open data standards? Anderson's vision for the future hints at the possibilities:

• Error Detection at Scale: Compare imagery data against CAMA records to find discrepancies automatically
• Historical Analysis: Identify buildings demolished years ago that still appear in your system
• Intelligent Routing: Solve the traveling salesman problem for assessment, accounting for one-way streets, gated communities, and real-world obstacles
• Quality Control in Real-Time: Catch data collection errors while appraisers are still in the field, not weeks later

None of this requires proprietary magic. It requires access to your own data in formats that multiple systems can understand.

Key Takeaways

For Assessors: When evaluating vendors, ask hard questions about data portability. Can you export your sketches in a standard format? Are your photos accessible outside their system? If the answer involves additional fees or technical barriers, consider it a red flag.

For Leadership: Budget for integration, not just implementation. The cheapest all-in-one solution may become the most expensive when you factor in the cost of being locked into mediocre tools for critical functions.

For the Profession: Support vendors who embrace open standards. As Anderson notes, "I would much rather have you as a customer because you love our support, you love our product. I don't want you as a customer because we've encrypted your data."

The data we collect belongs to the public. The tools we use to collect it should serve that principle, not subvert it. In an era where technology advances faster than procurement cycles, open standards aren't just nice to have, they're essential for responsible governance.