The Loveland Blog

Page 2

New: Flexible seats in Landgrid Team

By Sahana Murthy on May 18, 2021 · Announcements

You asked and we listened.
For a while now, you’ve all been asking for custom-sized team accounts that allow you to create multi-user accounts that meet the needs of your organization.

And we have just the thing for you.

Introducing the new flexible Landgrid Team accounts - Add as many seats to your account as you need so your team can collaborate from one central location, build beautiful maps, prospect data by creating survey projects and much more.  Landgrid Pro customers - you can add more seats to your account too.
All for $20/month per user. 

How does this work, you ask?

  1. Start at our plans page - https://landgrid.com/plans
  2. Select the plan of your choice, and add as many users as you want in that account. Gone are the days of a default team account with a minimum of 10 members. You can have as few as 2 members to as many as you like, depending on the size of your team and organization. 

via GIPHY

  1. Sign up and voila - you have a custom-sized multi-user team account all set up for you. Go to the “Members” tab and invite your teammates to join this account. 


Simple. Easy-Peezy!

Why Team accounts?

  • Multiple seats - You and your entire team can collaborate from one corporate account - how amazing is that, especially if you have a bunch of property surveys lined up!
  • Unlimited Projects, Surveys and Bookmarks - Do away with your Pro account limits by signing up for Team instead - unlimited number of projects, surveys and bookmarks!
  • Unlock and download premium fields as CSV - With your team accounts, you can download upto 50K rows of our data, including the premium fields as CSV per month. Our premium data fields include:


Seamlessly grow your Pro account into Team:

Landgrid Pro has always been a single user account. But we have often had customers who start off with a single seat Pro account but have later requested for those pro accounts to be converted into Team accounts. You can now seamlessly upgrade your Pro account into Team with a click of button.

How, you ask?

  1. New customer - If you are a brand new user, you can add more seats to your account when you sign up from our plans page itself. 
  2. Existing Pro customer - On your dashboards, you now have the option of upgrading to Team seamlessly by using the slider bar and adding more seats to your account.

No more wait-time, no more support emails. You have all the tools you need to customize your account size in a matter of seconds, at $20/month per seat. 

Why did we build these flexible team accounts?

  • We saw the need for custom-sized accounts. Teams and organization sizes vary. Our default team account of 10 was great but we had customers asking for custom-sized team accounts, some with fewer than 10 members, & others with more than 10 members. 
  • We had many Pro, single seat customers reach out after they had evaluated the Pro solution asking to convert their single user account to multi-user. 
  • To make it easier to allow multiple user teams to collaborate and work together from a central location.
  • To make it even more inexpensive to have multi-user accounts than the default $250 per month. We’ve made sure to apply the $50 discount to our existing $250 per month team account customers as well. 


You asked and we listened. These team accounts are full of advantages. So make the most of them today and sign up for these custom-sized accounts and let us know how your experience was. 



Demo Webinar - Flexible multi-user Team accounts

Want to see a live demo of these new team accounts?
Join our team members - Nick Downer and Sahana Murthy on a live demo webinar this afternoon, where they’ll discuss and demonstrate these new team accounts and features. You don’t want to miss it. 
Register here to save your spot - https://www.crowdcast.io/e/launching-flexible




We have many more data related announcements coming soon. So be on the lookout for updates from us this summer. Until next time, stay well and stay safe.  


Happy Mapping!

 

Hiring: Full Stack Developer - Ruby on Rails (Remote)

By Larry Sheradon on May 7, 2021 · Announcements

Salary range: $80,000 - $100,000 for shorter professional experience or $100,000 - $120,000 for longer professional experience, and depending on specific skills and qualifications

We need a software developer who can help grow our products, our engineering efforts and our roadmap. 

This is a full-time position with great benefits, including a competitive compensation structure & a remote work environment. The job requires understanding customer pain points, our product roadmap and implementing code on cross-functional products.

This is the perfect opportunity for anyone who is looking to explore a career in a new industry - software & data in the data and startup space. Lots of opportunities for growth in a fun, flexible, remote & fast paced environment. We are a small but growing team and we want you to grow with us.

The ideal candidate needs to be a motivated self-starter and have a keen interest for both software development, front end development skills, curiosity to learn new skills and understand market requirements for products.

Core skills

Your day to day work will primarily center around these tools:

  • Ruby on Rails
  • Relational databases (Postgres & PostGIS)
  • Javascript with front-end frameworks like React & jQuery

Good skills to have

We’d love to know if you have experience with any of the following, but please don’t count yourself out if you don’t: 

  • Experience working in a remote-first environment
  • Payment APIs like Stripe, Google Play, or Apple IAP
  • Building and documenting REST APIs, creating client wrapper libraries
  • Familiarity with geospatial data and tools like GDAL, QGIS, Leaflet, Mapbox GL
  • Integrating & tuning search engines like Solr or Elasticsearch

Job Responsibilities

  • Work with a team of software developers & data engineers across all of our product lines
  • Contribute code to front- and back-end features in our Rails application
  • Ability to split your time on a weekly basis between roadmap priorities, bugs and customer requests.
  • Help scope/solution out custom professional services development work, built on top of our Landgrid mapping platform

Job Requirements

  • 3+ years of experience in software development in a fast-paced environment
  • Experience in communicating data & product requirements and interpreting customer expectations
  • Ability to troubleshoot quickly and architect product solutions to address bugs & mission critical issues

 

About Loveland Technologies LLC

Loveland Technologies is a Detroit-based nationwide parcel data & mapping software company. We are headquartered in Detroit, however we are a fully remote & distributed team with members working out of multiple time zones across the USA. Loveland welcomes and gives equal consideration to qualified applicants of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, or disability status. Benefits include flexible work hours and vacation days, health care, and paid parental leave.

Landgrid Parcel Data - We have collected and standardized a high quality nationwide dataset of over 147 million land parcels covering over 97% of residents in the USA. We offer our data in multiple formats to customers across private and public sector verticals as bulk data files & through an API. Our Mapping as a Service product, landgrid.com, allows our customers to map & survey with the parcel data we have collected. Our mobile apps give individuals and teams access to the latest parcel data and data collection tools in the field.

Over the last several years, we have created a successful suite of products, a growing customer base and project portfolio, and an effective organization. Our products are built in-house from scratch and are a labor of love that has become great business.

To apply

We invite all qualified applicants to submit a resume and cover letter for this position by emailing us at jobs@landgrid.com.

Hiring: Front-end Developer - React + Ruby (Remote)

By Larry Sheradon on May 7, 2021 · Announcements

Salary range: $80,000 - $100,000 for shorter professional experience or $100,000 - $120,000 for longer professional experience, and depending on specific skills and qualifications

We are looking for a software developer who can help grow our products, our engineering efforts and our roadmap by focusing on the user-facing experience of our platform.

This is a full-time position with great benefits, including a competitive compensation structure & a remote work environment. The job requires understanding customer pain points, our product roadmap and implementing code on cross-functional products.

This is the perfect opportunity for anyone who is looking to explore a career in a new industry - software & data in the data and startup space. Lots of opportunities for growth in a fun, flexible, remote & fast paced environment. We are a small but growing team and we want you to grow with us.

The ideal candidate needs to be a motivated self-starter and have a keen interest for both software development, front end development skills, curiosity to learn new skills and understand market requirements for products.

Core skills

Your day to day work will primarily center around these tools:

  • React & Redux
  • jQuery & asynchronous, event-driven Javascript
  • CSS / SASS and mobile-friendly, responsive design
  • Ruby on Rails
  • A keen eye for product usability & UX, bonus points for design experience

Good skills to have

We’d love to know if you have experience with any of the following, but please don’t count yourself out if you don’t: 

  • Experience working in a remote-first environment
  • Building, editing & maintaining CMS templates to fit design guidelines
  • Familiarity with mapping toolkits like Leaflet or Mapbox

Job Responsibilities

  • Work with a team of software developers & data engineers across all of our product lines
  • Contribute code to front- and back-end features in our Rails application, with a focus on UI development
  • Ability to split your time on a weekly basis between roadmap priorities, bugs and customer requests.

Job Requirements

  • 3+ years of experience in software development in a fast-paced environment
  • Experience in communicating data & product requirements and interpreting customer expectations
  • Ability to troubleshoot quickly and implement solutions to address bugs & mission critical issues
  • Help scope/solution out custom professional services development work, built on top of our Landgrid mapping platform

 

About Loveland Technologies LLC

Loveland Technologies is a Detroit-based nationwide parcel data & mapping software company. We are headquartered in Detroit, however we are a fully remote & distributed team with members working out of multiple time zones across the USA. Loveland welcomes and gives equal consideration to qualified applicants of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, or disability status. Benefits include flexible work hours and vacation days, health care, and paid parental leave.

Landgrid Parcel Data - We have collected and standardized a high quality nationwide dataset of over 147 million land parcels covering over 97% of residents in the USA. We offer our data in multiple formats to customers across private and public sector verticals as bulk data files & through an API. Our Mapping as a Service product, landgrid.com, allows our customers to map & survey with the parcel data we have collected. Our mobile apps give individuals and teams access to the latest parcel data and data collection tools in the field.

Over the last several years, we have created a successful suite of products, a growing customer base and project portfolio, and an effective organization. Our products are built in-house from scratch and are a labor of love that has become great business.

To apply

We invite all qualified applicants to submit a resume and cover letter for this position by emailing us at jobs@landgrid.com.

Why Parcel Data Matters?

By Sahana Murthy on May 6, 2021 · How-To

***This blog is a part of the "All you need to know about parcel data." blog series.***

I have been working at Loveland for a little over 2 years now. Everytime I meet anyone new, when asked what my company does - I often find myself explaining what land parcels are. Because without the explanation, most folks who aren’t familiar with the term “parcel data”, would automatically assume parcels aka packages, transportation and freight industry. Makes for a great conversation starter because I then go on to explain “what land parcels are”, how land is divided & owned but also about how parcel data essentially comprises geometry - polygons with shapes & boundaries ...and as I explain, I see their eyes widen with fascination. Such is the power of land parcels. 
 
As our CEO - Jerry Paffendorf - puts it:  “I am on a parcel, you are on a parcel, everyone is on a parcel for most part of their day!”
It really is the most FUNDAMENTAL piece of information that is applicable to absolutely everyone. 
That’s why parcel data matters!
 
At the end of the day, parcel data is made of public record facts about how the country is subdivided, owned, taxed, and used. The public nature of the subdivision of land in the US stretches back to the earliest days of the country and big public programs like the US Public Land Survey which started in 1785. At Loveland, we see ourselves as providing a missing service by aggregating all these local datasets together into a big picture of how we own, use, and inhabit the country, at an affordable price.
 
So essentially, what we do as the cadastral kind is collect this information from over 3000 counties across the country, weave it into a beautifully standardized schema and license it to our customers in multiple formats. 
 
And that’s right - I did refer to us as the “Cadastral kind” - we believe it takes a different kind of DNA and tenacity to put this dataset together without compromising quality and accuracy. Our team is brimming with this DNA for sure. ;)
 
Which is why our customers choose and trust us over collecting all this data themselves and normalizing it. 
 
Why is this such a tall order, you ask? 
 
  1. For starters, tirelessly collecting, cleaning and standardizing such a comprehensive dataset of ~150 million parcels across the country is no small feat. Takes years of tenacious effort, a combination of some level of tested/trusted automation but a lot of manual Qc’ing and continuous improvements of the data on a monthly basis. A mammoth task, one that’s best left to the experts - aka the incredible Loveland Data Team!
     
  2. Secondly and most importantly,normalizing such a massive disparate raw dataset is really the hardest part of this process.We do rely on a very robust set of open source geo tools like PostGIS, QGIS, and GDAL. There’s still a lot of manual work backed by the judgement and experience of our parcel team.
Nearly every one of the 3,200 counties in the US manages its data independently. There’s very little consistency from place to place even for basic columns like “owner name”: it could be referred to as “firstname”, “fname”, “deedholder, “propow”, or pretty much anything else. And you’d think that a field called “Parcel ID” or “APN” might be unique — but it rarely is. Which is why we built in a universal parcel ID to make ingestion and working with this data at scale easy for everyone.
Generally, counties within states are more like each other than counties outside of those states, but not necessarily. Also, cleaning the data can be quite tricky at times. Working with this data makes it apparent how much human error can be involved, especially when it comes to casting columns that should be integers or double precision from text. Date field conversion can also be quite tricky at times, depending on the formatting used by a place. A lot of rules built up over time through these learnings plus the keen eyes of our data team help us keep quality high.
 
  1. And finally, this data while is technically public data, it doesn’t necessarily mean open data and freely available for downloading. And with 3,200 counties nationwide, one can imagine what might go into acquiring this data before we can weave our magic into it. 
 
That said, the real magic is really what one can do with this data when normalized at scale. The opportunities and the use cases are limitless - from real estate to renewable energy, utilities, manufacturing, insurance, GIS and tech, outdoor recreation to urban planning to using the data to bring upon positive change in your city or drive academic research on property landscape, COVID, on tax foreclosures, on disparity in land ownership - phew - just to name a few.  
 
Here’s a quick read on how & why parcel data is valuable to the renewable energy industry - https://landgrid.com/blog/renewables
 
I didn't make this list up. These are the very real use cases that our customers have come to us with over the years and have found our parcel dataset to be THE solution to help solve these problems.
 
Such is the power of parcel data and THAT IS WHY IT MATTERS and that is why Loveland matters!
 
You can read up on our data, coverage and customers here - https://landgrid.com/parcels
 
If you’d like to evaluate our data and learn more about how it can help your next project, please email us at parcels@landgrid.com.
 
 
About this blog series - All things you need to know about Parcel Data!
 
Join me - Sahana Murthy, the Chief Product Officer at Loveland Technologies, as I embark on this educational journey about land parcels, our parcel dataset, what goes into it, how you can use it and much more.
 
With every blog, I will dig deeper into the key facets about our parcel dataset, so keep an eye out for our next blog in this series. If you have a particular subject in mind that you’d like me to cover as part of this blog series, please write to me directly at sahana@landgrid.com. We are always looking for feedback and suggestions.
 

Categories

All Posts