Integrate with ACRIS

[wstlabs]

ACRIS (aka the Automated City Register Information System) provides a much richer set of ownership information than we already have. For example, the attached screenshot shows various kinds of mortgage-related events for 1 West 72nd St, Manhattan (aka The Dakota). You can get to this page via accessing the "Tax and Property Records" link in the results page for that map in the city's GIS map.

And you can apparently do new searches through this page:

• http://a836-acris.nyc.gov/DS/DocumentSearch/BBL?Submit2=New+Parcel+Identifier+Search

Questions are:

• Is it desirable to link to this data somehow?
• And if so, how? We might be able to just link to it (or rather, redirect to a POST request to the above form), using the BBL we've fetched from the geoclient. Not super elegant but should be doable.
• Or as a non-profit we might be able to get a reasonable subscription license for it, and display it directly in the app.
• Again, assuming this feature would be (highly) desirable to have. That's the main question.

[wstlabs]

Lower priority for now

[wstlabs]

ACRIS links should be trivially addable; for example, here's how you get the transaction history on BBL = 1003790020:

http://a836-acris.nyc.gov/bblsearch/bblsearch.asp?borough=1&block=00379&lot=0020

Only major unknown to this approach is whether the serving host (in this case 'a836-acris.nyc.gov') is always available at that address, or whether it mutates from time to time.