The challenge: first aid for real estate info

"Processing requests for real estate information involves a lot of administrative work," Ann Cuppens, GIS coordinator at the municipality of Heusden-Zolder quips. "Manually looking up, interpreting, copying and pasting information into a text document is not only time-consuming, the risk of errors is also quite high."

Even before there was talk of the Flemish Real Estate Information Platform, Heusden-Zolder launched a project to handle the notary letter fully automatically.

"We were looking for a tool that could exchange information with different systems. That's how we quickly arrived at FME," says Ann. "GIM's years of experience and expertise in processing GIS data with FME convinced us of the power of this solution. Moreover, the training at GIM allows us to set up automatic procedures in FME ourselves. So we can also use this tool for a lot of other processes in our municipality."

"We did get a bit of a shock when the Flemish Government announced the Real Estate Information Platform. Fortunately, GIM's FME solution for the notary letter was sufficiently flexible and easily reusable for the Real Estate Information Platform. Only the link with VIP's API was an extra job for which we engaged GIM again," Ann continues.

The solution: fully automated processing of information requests

The VIP platform first collects data on a property transaction itself from available regional sources. Then it is up to the local administration to supplement this information with local data.

For that last step, FME offers the perfect solution. It completely autonomously retrieves all open applications from the VIP platform. It then searches the local datasets for information about each parcel. The information found is automatically added to the file on the VIP platform. There, the employees of the municipal administration can check the file and finally validate it.