Property Data in Maestro

Downtown organizations are some of the best when it comes to knowing their properties. We know who the owner is, the architecture, maybe even the architect, the entire history of a building. Keeping that data together is often another story. If you are lucky you have a spreadsheet somewhere with the important information in it. More than likely, you have a folder with a bunch of old paper in it and someone who you can call because they are incredibly knowledgable about the property.

We all reference buildings by the businesses that used to occupy the storefront. We know that businesses come and go, people do the same, but the properties are the constant. They span generations, and they help to tell the story of your community, but sorting all that history can be a challenge. This is where Maestro can help.

Maestro has a comprehensive properties section that allows you to track all the important information about a building. From the year it was built and the architect to the businesses that call that property home. There are convenient places to keep information such as property improvements, sales dates and amounts, even photos. You can add appropriate registries such as National Register of Historic Places or Local Landmark designations as well. The best part is that once you have your information into Maestro, you always have access to it anytime, anywhere. The volunteers and staff can come and go, but your organization’s data is always right where you need it.

There are even more fields coming to properties in the next update of Maestro as well. We’ve seen organization utilizing involvements on properties to store even more data. Some of these organizations have added an involvement for architectural style so that they can search by this criteria.

Often we are so concerned about filling properties with businesses and attracting customers to the area that we don’t take the time to put the data we have about the properties to good use. We have some amazing stories in our downtowns and many of them revolve around the buildings. We encourage you to utilize Maestro to organize your data so that you can easily tell those stories!

Need help collecting the data? This is a terrific internship project for a young student – especially one that is studying Historic Preservation. Talk to your local colleges or post an ad on internships.com. Need help getting your data in? Don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ve got data entry specialists who can help!