Managing Property: Addresses, Parcels, and Owners

Property includes all of the address, parcel, and owner (APO) information that users can associate with records:

• Addresses are physical locations within parcels.

• Parcels are an area of land that has a specific location and legally defined boundaries. A parcel can have multiple addresses.

• Owners are associated with specific parcels; they are often responsible for their parcels and can serve as a point of contact.

You store APO data in your Civic Platform database as reference data. Reference data is reusable content that you can add to records without having to recreate the content for each record. For example, an administrator creates a parcel record, with information on the location and size of the parcel. This information is reference data. When a user creates an application to build a house on the parcel, the information contained in the parcel record is reusable within the application.

When users add APO reference data to a record, they select an existing address, parcel, or owner from a list. The APO reference data resides in your agency's database. Users do not need to enter any new information. If users edit or remove the APO reference data associated with a record, the change only affects the current record. The original information in the database remains unchanged.

You can also manually add new property information to a record by filling out a set of forms. New property data remains solely with the record; it does not automatically update to the reference database.

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