Kay has worked in the Loudon County Assessor’s Office for nearly three decades, and has personally handled deeds since 2005. For most of that time, the process was entirely paper-based.

When the Register of Deeds recorded new documents, staff made physical copies and delivered them to the Assessor’s Office. Kay worked through each deed manually, marking up the paper with notes about any questions, conversations, or unresolved issues. Finished deeds were bound into “books” and stored in a closet with hundreds of books over the years.

As volumes grew and the market heated up, this became more and more difficult to sustain. At peak times, Kay could see 100–150 pages of deeds per day, and even after the office started scanning documents into PDF, she still had to:

• Scan and clean up batches of deeds
• Delete blank pages and convert to PDFs
• Manually key ownership changes into the CAMA system
• Keep detailed notes so colleagues could understand any issues later

A heavy batch of documents could take an hour just to scan and convert before she even began data entry. And because she was the only person processing deeds, any backlog waited for her return whenever she was out of the office.

On top of that, Loudon County still maintains a physical index card for every parcel in the county, with the chain of ownership handwritten on each card. That meant even more manual work updating records every time ownership changed.

Kay was excited about the possibility of going digital (especially for accuracy) but, in her words, “I’m not a real tech-savvy person,” so any new system needed to be simple, reliable, and worth the change.

Loudon County adopted Just Appraised Deeds Automation to move from paper and PDFs into an AI-assisted workflow. Instead of manually re-entering every field, Kay now reviews and confirms data that’s automatically extracted from each deed.

During onboarding, the Just Appraised team worked closely with her to understand every nuance of her process: from how she keys owner names, to how she wants ampersands vs. “and,” to how she documents tricky parcels.

That collaboration paid off:

• AI extraction handles the heavy lifting. The system reads deeds, identifies key fields, and populates data for review so Kay can focus on verification instead of typing.
• Annotations and notes moved into the platform. Kay uses Just Appraised’s built-in notes and annotations to keep the same level of documentation she kept in her PDFs, only now it’s directly attached to the deeds.
• Consistency is preserved. Most “corrections” she makes today are stylistic, like changing “and” to “&” to keep data keyed the way she prefers.
• Support is responsive. Whenever something doesn’t look quite right or she has a question, she emails or chats with the team and gets quick help.

Even though Loudon County isn’t fully paperless yet (Kay still maintains the index card system and prints appraisal cards for each processed sale) the core deeds workflow is now digital and AI-assisted.

The shift from manual entry to AI-assisted review has changed how Loudon County approaches deeds work, without forcing the office to abandon its long-standing paper processes overnight.

Key outcomes:

• Kay reports that she now makes very few corrections. When something is off, it’s usually explainable. For example, illegible handwriting or cramped numbers on the original document.
• Instead of spending time scanning and keying data, she now reviews extracted fields and confirms parcels, moving through deeds more quickly and confidently.
• After taking a full week off, Kay opened Just Appraised to find 95 deeds waiting. She was able to work through nearly half of them by early afternoon on her first day back, a workload that would have been far more daunting in the old process.
• While the county still uses index cards and printed appraisal cards today, the digital deeds workflow is already in place. When Loudon County is ready to go fully paperless, a key piece of the puzzle will already be modernized.

The mapper on the team, Jimmy, has also seen benefits. For parcel combinations and certain changes, he can “zip it right through” Just Appraised instead of keying everything manually, especially compared with his previous fully manual steps in Esri and Impact.