“Yapping on Mapping: Using GIS to manage college and university landholdings”
Association of University Real Estate Officials (AUREO) Annual Conference – 2024
Presenters:
Chris Van Drimmelen – Oregon State University
Cindy Kennedy – Ohio State University
Lindsay Pozniak – Ohio State University
Synopsis: Many colleges and universities hold significant amounts of land acquired over long periods of time via purchases, gifts, exchanges, condemnation actions, and grants. Good stewardship of an institution’s land as a resource begins with an accurate accounting of what the institution owns, how it was acquired, use restrictions, encumbrances, and many other considerations. Oregon State University has long recognized the need for such a database and in 2023 embarked upon a journey to leverage both its existing GIS infrastructure and historical property records to fully catalog the full gamut of their 20,000+ acre real property portfolio. This effort received significant guidance from the Ohio State University’s Planning, Architecture, and Real Estate team, using their GIS system, established in 2012, as a model. This presentation aims to:
– Provide an opportunity for other institutions to ask questions about the process of building and maintaining GIS based systems to track land ownership.
– Highlight primary considerations for colleges/universities considering building a GIS based landholdings catalog.
– Outline the steps taken by Oregon State University in building a new system for land management.
– Provide examples of both Oregon State and Ohio State’s systems as a developing product and a mature product respectively.