BACKGROUND
The City of Shaker Heights is part of the First Suburbs Development Council in Northeast Ohio. They have a diverse population of about 29,000 people, a growing business community, and a well-established residential population. Shaker Heights prides itself on its historic architecture, parks, schools, and lakes.
CHALLENGE
Every home sale within the City of Shaker Heights involves a multi-step process that requires input from many departments, employees, and citizens. The former process was difficult to track and staff had to hunt in different location for all of the necessary details. The main challenges to address were how to make an efficient process that was flexible enough to accommodate the variety of home sale situations, and to allow the City to track all violations, escrow deposits, and escrow disbursements accurately and in a single system.
SOLUTION
Working with the City of Shaker Heights team, we examined their complex process, identified the range of variable situations, and planned how to digitize the entire process. The Point-of-Sale application was created for Realtors to notify the City of their intention to sell the house. The city reviews the application, property history, and completes one or more property inspections. The seller has the option to fix the violations or put money in escrow for the buyer to apply towards repairs. We also developed a process to track escrow funds and disbursements, including system conditions that ensure only the appropriate citizens can request disbursement of the escrow funds.
OUTCOME
The City of Shaker Heights chose to roll out it's new Point of Sale and Escrow Process in stages before making it available to its citizens online. The first stage was a rollout to internal users, which allowed staff time to understand the new process and all its variables. Next, the City opened the process to key Realtors. Now, Shaker Heights performs all steps of their Point of Sale and Escrow Process online, and stores all required documentation within a single citizenserve file. They love the ability to keep everything in a central location.
"Working with Shaker Heights was a great experience. We were able to collaborate and explore avenues outside the standard use of our system. We came up with a great solution to allow for the data to be available in a single location for all parties involved."