THE PREDICTIVE USE OF GIS TO MODEL PROPERTY VALUATIONS

GIS is a technology which is ideally suited to analysis of the market values of properties, since such values are based upon spatial compari sons as well as individual property attributes. Great Britain now has a new mechanism of local taxation, the council tax, which is based upo n the capital values of properties. Central to the implementation of t his tax has been the potentially controversial assignment of propertie s to valuation 'bands'. This paper posits that a geographical model em bedded within a GIS provides an alternative means of devising credible capital values, and anticipates some of the prospects for the use of GIS in local revenue-raising.