Utilizing ArcPro for Single Family Rental Tracking and Analysis

The learning objective is that attendees take away knowledge on how to implement GIS for managing and analyzing the progress and success of policies aimed to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its residents.

Background:
On August 19, 2019 the City of Fate adopted ordinance O-2019-037. This Ordinance established a Rental Registration and Inspection program for Single Family and Multi-Family dwelling units. The program began to be implemented on January 1, 2020. The program is designed to protect the health safety and welfare of the City of Fate residents as well as retaining and protecting the property values of your property. The program works as follows. Each owner of a residential rental unit within the City of Fate shall register each rental unit. A separate registration is required for each rental unit. Each residential rental registration application is valid for each rental unit for one year and is required to be renewed annually. If a property changes ownership, a new residential rental registration is required. 

Why Map as Well:
In October 2022, the City of Fate Building Department requested help from the Planning and Development Department to run a QA/QC check on the status of the rental registration program. The main intent was to identify which properties in the City of Fate were rentals that has not registered with the city and reach out to the landlords and/or property owners to register or renew their properties. A secondary desire was to be able to track the present of housing stock that had been turned into rental properties by neighborhood as new properties registered with the city. ESRI ArcPro, along with other compatible programs, was utilized to take an inventory on the existing rental status prior to January 1st, 2020 by evaluating multiple separate date sets, identifying residential vs commercial/industrial products, and creating a working shapefile that can be constantly updated for easy access to tracking the percentage of owner vs renter housing status in all of Fate’s neighborhoods; both newer suburban subdivisions as well a large lot residential estate neighborhoods. This would allow the city to prepare reports and run analysis for decision makers. By preparing a visual aid in the form of a map, decision makers can better understand what a certain percentage of a neighborhood city truly looks like rather than each individual trying to picture what that percentage looks like. To fulfill the Building Departments request, the Planning and Development Department utilized ESRI ArcPro. 

High-Level Overview of Methodology:
The first step was to create a method to identify commercial/industrial vs residential property. This was done by importing Rockwall County CAD data and the City of Fate’s zoning map. By using the “Select by Location” feature, a new layer was able to be created that excluded the Industrial and Rental Properties. Using Satellite imagery provided by ESRI ArcPro’s imagery base maps, vacant and raw land properties were identified and removed. The remaining parcels were exported to Excel. This table was then cross referenced with a list of registered rental properties. Results were digitized into 1 and 0; 1 for rentals and 0 for owner properties. For the remaining properties, a IF Statement was performed to identify if the Situs Address and Owner Address matched. If they did, the property was assumed to be a Owner property. If they were different, the property was assumed to be a rental. The resulting data table was imported to ESRI ArcPro and joined to the larger Rockwall County CAD data set. This allowed us to prepare a Rental Registration Working shapefile that could be updated as new rentals registered with the city. Using this, plus neighborhood boundaries, the city is able to run Queries, Reports, and conduct analysis on a wide variety of topics decision makers are interested in.  

Results:
Using the RCAD situs address and owner address methodology, the city was able to identify 1,168 parcels as suspected single family rental properties. When the cross referencing methodology was applied to this list, the City was able to identify 642 total properties as confirmed single family rental properties. The remaining 526 properties were mailed a notice to register as rentals. As of February 8th, 2023, that mailer has resulted in an additional 154 properties registering into the City of Fate’s Rental Registration Program. At $100 per registration, this is $1,154 in fees the city has been able to collect. The city plans to send additional follow-ups to the remaining 372 property owners.