Deschutes County launched a new version of their online property search in January 2013.  The service is called DIAL, as in dial up the property information you are looking for.

The look of the new Deschutes County DIAL is the first improvement users will notice.  Graphics area big part of the website now whereas before we were presented with essentially a bland white page and had to dig through the information to find what we were looking for (see screenshot at right).  Now the information is broken up into tables or charts (where it applicable) and displayed in a way that is easy to decipher.

Navigation in the new Deschutes County DIAL is much easier with a menu on the left side of the screen that allows the user to easily move from property taxes to sales information to county development documents relating to the property in question.  Previously if you didn’t select the check-box for sales information when you started your search then you had to go back to the home page and start your search over.

Search is another thing that is dramatically improved with the new DIAL.  No longer do you have to tell the system what parameter you are searching for, i.e., address, owner, tax lot, account number.  Now you can enter any parameter and get relevant results displayed in a way that makes it easy to find what you are looking for.  The real estate search below was for “Revere” and DIAL returned results that included properties on the street Revere and owners with Revere in the name.   From there,  if your search returns too many results you can drill down further by filtering for property type, city, street direction and/or zip code.  This is a big improvement over the search results from the old DIAL. All you have to do is compare the search results below to those above.  Both searches were for “Revere.”

Plat maps and other Deschutes County Community Development documents are now available on DIAL too.  With the old system users had to find their way to Deschutes County LAVA for this information.  Now it is right there under the Development tab on the menu.

For more information about how or why a real estate search on DIAL might be useful to owners, buyers or sellers see our previous post about Deschutes County DIAL.