Cuyahoga County: Scrape and Store Delinquent Tax Information

[ludstuen90]

Instead of a "tax lien" boolean, store a Delinquent Tax field that will have an mount of the delinquent taxes.

This will help us find out lucrative properties with large tax bills to wipe out.

[ludstuen90]

In looking at how to download delinquent tax information, at this point it looks like the easiest way will be to download this information from the tax bill:

https://myplace.cuyahogacounty.us/NjcxMTEyNDQ=?city=OTk=&searchBy=UGFyY2Vs&dataRequested=VGF4IEJpbGw=

[ludstuen90]

Called Cuyahoga Recorder's office to find out more information about where to find delinquent taxes; rep confirmed delinquent tax amount will show up under Tax balance summary, immediately on the current year tax bill page. (See link in earlier comment).

Did not have a sample parcel ID to provide, but will search property records to find this out.

[ludstuen90]

Cuyahoga County appears to publish delinquent properties here https://fiscalofficer.cuyahogacounty.us/en-US/GIS/DelPublication.aspx

[ludstuen90]

Bingo: A delinquent property tax looks like this.

The question is whether it will be easier to parse this information from MyPlace site or from the aforementioned delinquent publication.

[ludstuen90]

Initial observations on the delinquent tax publication site:

• Appears to use ViewStates to retain information about the user as they move throughout the site.
• Using the Fiscal Officer's site to pull information about the properties would add another step to our scarping process, whereas we are already accessing the tax page in the initial scraping process; this would mean we could potentially scrape data faster.
• It's not clear from the information presented on the site how often the delinquent properties are updated... if it's twice per year only in print, or if the website itself is only updated twice per year. This could potentially mean the MyPlace site has more up-to-date information.

Initial observations from the MyPlace site:

• Information is less structured than the delinquent tax publication site. We'd be looking through a table for specific text to appear in a column, rather than able to parse all information in every column, and trust that it represents a delinquent property.
• Depending on how information is entered into the system, a typo could potentially mean we'd miss a result. (Searching for the text 'DELQ,' if a typo means 'DELQ' is entered in as 'DELW,' it could potentially be missed.
• Some parcel results in the MyPlace system are 'linked' results, in that a parcel result holds no information, but links to another parcel. Is there a possibility that an 'empty/linked' parcel could contain DELQ information?

[ludstuen90]

There appear to be more advantages to using the MyPlace site, if we can create a scraping mechanism that will accurately catch all records. Experimenting with this now

[ludstuen90]

Able to retrieve this information successfully with BeautifulSoup. Feature implemented with https://github.com/ludstuen90/property_project_ohio/pull/124