Project








Land Bank Market Place


Summary

Looking to own a home or land for less! Interested in rehabilitating your community and city! Consider buying a LAND BANK property!! A sales pitch from the city to its citizens asking them to take the march towards its development into a flourishing environment. 

The success and failure of this pitch depends on the effective communication established by the city with its citizens. While an internet based platform can provide this in an efficient manner, care has to be taken in order to make the process comprehensive, flexible and easy. 

Our project provides a web based platform for such a process that provides essential information about the land bank properties, like location, price, square footage, assessed damage, and enables a seamless communication between the city and interested buyers. Also our approach integrates the non-buying citizens in this process by providing them an opportunity to campaign for their neighborhood and enables the city to market their land bank properties in order to attract more buyers.


 


Full Description

Land banks properties are underused, abandoned, tax-delinquent ones that are made available for purchase by the city. The Land Bank Authority is established by the city to acquire these tax-delinquent properties, in order to foster the public purpose of returning land which is in a non-revenue generating, nontax‐producing status to an productive use to remove blight, provide housing, and stabilize neighborhoods for the citizens of the city. 

To persuade and encourage the citizens to pursue such a noble effort, it is important to provide them a seamless process instead of burdening them with time consuming logistics and paperwork. In our project we provide such a communication through a website which provides the following:

The site can be found live HERE

  1. Efficient and easy identification of the land bank properties. A street address or zip code based search process is implemented along with an interactive map using Google Maps (and more specifically Google Fusion Tables).
  2. The same information is also available as a table.
  3. Specifications of the property, like pricing information which will be the current highest bid, and the assessed value. 
  4. Online application form for seamlessly connecting potential buyers and the city.
  5. Important location based information like nearby grocery stores, malls, recreational areas and entertainment centers. This is achieved through the search abilities of the integrated Google Map.
  6. Possible advantages of buying a specified property. This is achieved through comments and inputs from citizens living in specific neighborhoods. These comments will be screened and categorized based on the zip code and address it came from. Along with the individual comments an overall consensus will also be posted. 



Slides Presentation




Video Presentation


TEAM

Land Bank Market Place





MEMBERS

Jamall Harris- jay1bbc@gmail.com

Serkan Güldal
fizikimparatoru@gmail.com

Karthikeyan Lingasubramanian
klinga@uab.edu

Tom Brander
tombrander@gmail.com

Scott Weheby
scott.wehby@gmail.com

Robert Cook
geemale922@gmail.com






GITHUB

Git hub Repo.





IBM BLUEMIX USE

If you used Bluemix, please provide:

1) The URL of code repositories containing code (if a private repository, please Sandhya Kapoor, kapoor@us.ibm.com to the project with read access) 

2) List of Bluemix boilerplates, runtimes, services and add-ons used during the hackathon - if any services were used during the hackathon, but are not part of the demonstration please specify.





GLOBAL AWARDS

Entry for:
Best Software Project