Veerus Property Manager is a subscription service that makes it easy for governments to manage their surplus property and conduct public auctions.

In addition to generating revenue directly from the auction proceeds, the government benefits by transferring ongoing property maintenance costs to new owners, and by returning real estate to the tax roll for future assessment.

Yes. As described in an associated whitepaper: the auction administrator for Klamath County, Oregon found that the county increased its sales by 50%, reduced the required labor by two person-months, and saved several thousand dollars by using Veerus Property Manager.

Klamath County was also able to conduct three public property auctions within a six-month period, a pace that had previously been prohibitive due to the manual labor required for each auction.

No. Property auctions will continue to be conducted as they are now, in accordance with applicable state and local laws. (For example, in the State of Oregon, county auctions are usually conducted by the sheriff’s department at the county courthouse.)

However, Veerus Property Manager streamlines administration and reduces the cost of each auction: this includes administrative tasks like auction preparation, marketing to the public, registration of bidders, recording of sales, document generation, auction closing, and results analysis.

At a high level, Veerus Property Manager provides many features, including:

• Parcel database. The software manages a database of all parcels in the county’s inventory, including details such as legal description, map tax lot, assessor parcel number, and real market value, as well as a collection of photographs.
• Property management. Staff can define multiple auctions, each with their own open, start and end dates, and decide which parcels from its inventory should be included in each auction.
• Public auction website. When an auction is made public by the department staff, details and photographs of the parcels included in that auction are published to a dedicated website managed by Veerus, allowing interested buyers to research available properties on their own.
• Online bidder registration and bidder registration database. Prospective bidders can submit their registration information online and automatically generate registration forms. The property management staff can track all registered bidders in a centralized location.
• Bid card generation. The auction administrator can generate bid cards for all approved, registered bidders in a single action.
• Creation of legal documents. Following each sale, the relevant legal documents can be generated with minimal effort, using the customized language developed by the County’s legal team, and in the specific document formats approved by the County Recorder.
• Financial tracking. The system tracks the financial details of each sale, including down payments and recording fees. In cases where the purchase price is not paid in full, the software tracks balances due, payment dates, and interest, and generates the legal documents for payment agreements.

No. Veerus Property Manager is provided as a managed service; all required hardware and software is supplied by Veerus.

Veerus Property Manager is deployed on Microsoft Azure, a leading provider of cloud-based IT infrastructure.

Over 90% of Fortune 500 businesses run on the Microsoft Cloud, as well as many governments and startup businesses. Azure meets a broad set of international and industry-specific compliance standards, such as ISO 27001, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC 1 and SOC 2, as well as country-specific standards like Australia IRAP, UK G-Cloud, and Singapore MTCS. Rigorous third-party audits, such as by the British Standards Institute, verify Azure’s adherence to the strict security controls these standards mandate.

For more information regarding Azure compliance, please refer to: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/trusted-cloud/.

No. As a web-based service, Veerus Property Manager requires only a web browser and an Internet connection.

Veerus Property Manager is a web-based service that works well with all modern operating systems (including Windows, MacOS, Linux, and Chrome OS) and modern web browsers (including Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox).

The pages on the public-facing website published by Veerus are mobile-friendly.

Given the complex information being managed, and the scenarios our clients have been working with so far, we’ve been prioritizing property/auction management from large-screen devices. However, we’re very open to handling other mobile device use cases; please let us know what you need!

In most cases, no. Veerus Property Manager is provided as a managed service; all required hardware and software is supplied by Veerus, so you shouldn’t need to ask your IT department to do much, if anything.

Strictly speaking, no. In addition to the administrative tools for managing parcels and auctions, Veerus provides a public-facing website that shows potential bidders detailed information about each auction, the individual parcels for sale, photographs, etc.

We would, however, recommend that your content team create informational links from the relevant pages on your county website to the public-facing Veerus website. These links would only need to be created once, and would simply link to {countyname}.countypropertysales.com.

No. Veerus Property Manager is a subscription service, so you simply subscribe to use it. In this regard, budgeting is analogous to business services like Office 365 or G-Suite, or to consumer services like Amazon Prime or Netflix. (Think of it as being like your phone or electricity service.)

Typical subscriptions are for one year, which fits well with most government budget cycles.

While a discount is provided for annual payment, other payment cycles are possible; please contact us to discuss your specific needs.

The annual subscription fee is based on the size of the county. It is intended to balance the resources required to manage the number of auctions/parcels/photos etc., the effort required to set up and customize the software, develop new features, support the users, and address the specific needs of the individual county.

Please contact us if you’d like to discuss your specific needs in more detail.

The subscription fee includes:

• Unlimited access to Veerus Property Manager for managing parcels and conducting auctions.
• Unlimited users that can access your account (as you decide).
• Storage for an unlimited number of parcels, auctions, registrants, and document templates.
• Storage for parcel photographs.
• Setup and maintenance of the software for your account.
• A complementary barcode scanner (for new subscriptions).
• Up to 10 hours per year of dedicated support (for example, assistance customizing document templates and pages to meet your needs).
• Automatic access to all new features.
• Priority access for new feature requests.
• Regular backup of your account data.

No. All software upgrades are included as part of your subscription. As new features are introduced, you will automatically have access to them in your account.

In most cases, no. Veerus Property Manager is provided as an “off-the-shelf” subscription service, analogous to other business services like Office 365 or G-Suite, and simply represents an operational expense, not a capital expense.

We are happy to work with you to make the budgeting process as straightforward as possible for your situation.

As many as you want. Veerus Property Manager is licensed per-county, not per-user, so feel free to add any team members that you want to have administrative access.

We hope not. We’ve tried our best to strike a balance between covering our costs and making it accessible to you. We want this to be a no-brainer for you; let us know how to make it so for your situation!

Yes. You can create as many auctions as you like, each with their own open, start, and end dates.

If a parcel is not sold during a given auction, it can be rolled into the subsequent auction.

Yes. Each auction has its own start and end date: for a one-day auction, these dates will be the same, but for a multi-day auction they might be separated by a day or more.

When an auction is made public by the department staff, details and photographs of the parcels included in that auction are published to a dedicated website managed by Veerus, allowing interested buyers to research available properties on their own (thus reducing the effort required by your staff).

Currently there is not a direct link between Veerus Property Manager and assessor systems. However, this is a commonly-requested feature that we are evaluating and plan to implement soon. (Please let us know if this is a feature that you are interested in, and how you’d ideally like to use it.)

There are no fees associated with an auction itself. Veerus charges a small transaction fee for each property that is sold, as a percentage of the sales price. There are no fees incurred without substantially greater corresponding sales revenue, so there is no risk of losing money during an auction.

When a subscription is started, Veerus will send you a complementary barcode scanner that has been tested to work well with Veerus Property Manager. Use of the scanner is optional, but can help streamline the bid registration process substantially.

Bid registrations and bid cards will include a unique barcode on each printed document. When someone brings one of these documents to your office, you can simply scan the barcode to pull up the relevant account information quickly.

There is no restriction on the number of auctions, parcels, or registrants that can be managed within your account.

There is no limit to the number of pictures that can be uploaded for each parcel. However, for a smooth user experience on the published website, we recommend uploading no more than ten images per parcel.

Uploaded photographs must be less than 10MB. When a photograph is uploaded, the software may automatically resize/compress the image to optimize it for display on the website.

There is no limit to the number of document templates that you can create, nor the total number of documents that you can generate from those templates.

The documents are generated in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), an industry-standard format for page layout. The resulting PDF documents can be easily sent to a printer, saved to disk, and/or uploaded to a document management system, per your specific workflow and functional requirements.

The document templates are defined in Markdown, which is a plain-text markup language that is easy to understand. Veerus Property Manager provides default document templates, and includes a built-in editor that allows you to modify these templates easily and to preview changes. No specific technical skill is required to update the text of these document templates.

In addition, Veerus is available to help customize these templates for your specific needs. Let us know how we can help you!

Your subscription includes up to ten hours per year of direct support, which can be used for assistance with customizing documents and pages.

While we can accomplish a lot in ten hours, any customization projects that exceed this amount will be invoiced on a time and materials basis, with your prior approval. (That is, you won’t get an unexpected invoice from us.)

Just let us know what you need! Veerus wants to work directly with you on an individualized basis to maximize your success.

As you might expect, governments with active subscriptions will receive priority access for new feature requests.