I architected several web scrapers to download millions of property records in Ohio to calculate how much a tax loophole cost taxpayers.
I worked with a lawyer to combine my knowledge of software development with a thorough understanding of Ohio's laws. That combination meant we could identify what data sources provided value, and had the technical know-how to extract it.
One particular property sale we examined in our investigation used the property tax loophole to avoid paying $65,000 in conveyance tax fees at the time of sale, and an additional $309,000 per year in annual taxes.
I integrated Scrapy, a Python framework designed for web scraping, into a Django application.
The project was made possible by grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.