AppGeo Division of The Sanborn Map Company

MapGeo | Quarterly Newsletter

March 2026

Hi there,

This Quarter's MapGeo Community Spotlight
The Town of Belmont, Massachusetts!

Built in 1881, Belmont Town Hall is an 18,800-square-foot, four-story brick building at Concord Avenue and Pleasant Street with High Victorian and Queen Anne architectural influences.

A Clearer View of Belmont

With Cambridge on its border and downtown Boston just a few miles away,  The Town of Belmont, MA is much closer to the city than its quiet reputation suggests. The community features many homes from the 18th and early 19th century, including the grand country estate of John Perkins Cushing. John Cushing’s wish was that Belmont would carry on the name of his 200‑acre “Bellmont” estate when the community incorporated on March 18, 1859. These vintage homes now coexist with thoughtful construction, reflecting Belmont’s blend of heritage and progress.

Belmont’s commitment to thoughtful planning and public transparency is reflected through the recent addition of Sanborn’s MapGeo platform, which now serves as the town’s central gateway for parcel and land-use information. Residents, property owners, developers, and municipal staff can explore boundaries, zoning districts, ownership records, assessment data, and neighborhood context through a single interactive map rather than navigating multiple offices or static documents.

Important contextual maps such as proposed zoning changes are also featured on MapGeo. For example, the ease of which to layer existing zoning maps over 2026 proposed zoning allows for everything from independent homeowner research to real estate due diligence, permitting preparation, infrastructure coordination, and greater overall transparency. 

Belmont's 2026 Proposed Zoning theme turned on with a link to the Zoning Bylaws.

Historic Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps

For over a hundred and thirty years, The Sanborn Map Company was creating and maintaining fire insurance maps that were initially used for fire insurance underwriting. The Sanborn Maps provided the user with specific information such as address, building use, height, number of floors, and construction material for individual properties shown on the map.  During its long and proud history, Sanborn created maps of approximately 12,000 communities throughout the US.  Altogether, Sanborn has created over 1.5 million maps documenting the growth and development of US cities and towns.

Sanborn maps are currently widely used by various municipal departments such as planning, zoning, public works, building inspection, and fire departments for various reasons such as verifying and assisting in addressing, zoning review, areas for historic revitalization, old street alignments and Right-of-Ways, building permitting, etc. Historical Sanborn maps are also used extensively by professionals involved in environmental risk assessment, to help assess potential environmental risk based on prior property uses. These historic maps can be integrated into GIS systems and MapGeo to enhance the capabilities of workflows that have a historic review need.

If you are interested in adding the historic Sanborn Fire Insurance maps to your site, please reach out to the MapGeo support team for more information.

Sanborn's fire Insurance Maps integrated into MapGeo as a theme

How MapGeo Seamlessly Integrates with 3rd Party Systems

MapGeo is designed to connect your GIS with the other business systems your organization relies on every day. Through both in‑app integrations and flexible link‑based integrations, MapGeo can tie directly into permitting platforms, document management systems, and other operational tools your staff uses.

Municipalities across the country already leverage MapGeo to link parcel and location data to permitting systems such as CityView, Accela, PermitView, OpenGov, and ViewPoint Cloud enabling users to jump from a property on the map directly to the associated permits in a single click. This improves workflow efficiency and gives staff and residents a clearer understanding of property‑level activity.  

The Town of Acton, MA integrated OpenGov within MapGeo for internal staff. This integration allows staff to select a property in MapGeo and open a new tab to OpenGov with all the permits related to that property. 

SIQ Webinar - The Importance of GIS Data for Emergency Services

In emergency management, location intelligence saves time and time saves lives. GIS provides the spatial context needed to plan, respond, and recover effectively during crises. From being able to accurately locate an emergency to improving emergency response times, GIS data empowers agencies to make fast, informed, and data driven decisions when it matters most.

Join us for an engaging webinar where we’ll break down why high-quality GIS data is essential for emergency operations, featuring real examples drawn from common municipal datasets. And learn how the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) standards are changing and what you’ll need to know.

During this session, we’ll highlight how key GIS datasets support emergency preparedness and response, including:

- Address Points – Understand how precise address point datasets improve geocoding reliability and reduce dispatch errors.
- Indoor Mapping – Explore the aspect of how 3D buildings and indoor mapping can support first responders.
- Emergency Response Times – Discover why accurate road centerlines are critical for 911 routing, drive‑time analysis, and dispatch accuracy.
- Hiking Trail Maps – Learn how GIS trail data helps emergency responders locate lost or injured hikers, plan access routes, and coordinate search‑and‑rescue operations.

Assessor Revaluation Support

Municipalities can deliver a transparent, resident‑friendly revaluation experience through MapGeo. By integrating parcel data, CAMA information, and custom valuation layers, assessors can easily generate dynamic, interactive maps that clearly communicate how property values are determined.

MapGeo gives residents an accessible way to explore property data, view neighborhood trends, compare assessments, and understand the factors that influence valuation. Visual tools such as thematic maps and overlays help clarify the revaluation process, reduce call volume, and build public trust through open, easy‑to‑navigate information. 

The City of Gloucester, MA displays their Assessing Neighborhoods on MapGeo to allow residents to compare like properties.

In addition to the MapGeo interface, Sanborn can produce clear, accurate, and professionally designed digital PDF maps and other visuals to support the revaluation process. Digital PDF maps provide an accessible, printable resource for residents seeking clarity around neighborhood characteristics and valuation impacts. Sanborn has printed wall sized maps (4’x6’) for assessors to use during assessment hearings and public meetings during revaluation. Another alternative is an interactive dashboard which allows users to see the bigger picture, with more details than a PDF, to analyze the assessment data. An interactive digital dashboard has the ability to focus on property types like residential vs commercial or look at the difference between the current and previous revaluation and present changes to the data “on the fly”.

Sanborn created a dashboard for a municipality to support their revaluation process to disseminate residential and commercial property value data for residents.

GIS Data Development and Special Project Support

If your data has a spatial component, Sanborn can turn it into powerful, interactive GIS layers ready for use in MapGeo for both internal decision‑making and public transparency. Our team works with a wide variety of datasets and converts them into map‑ready formats, whether the goal is operational planning, community engagement, or infrastructure management. Organizations can take any location‑based data, such as park locations with detailed amenity attributes, critical infrastructure inventories, environmental features, utility assets, or permitting datasets and transform them into structured GIS layers that can be hosted, visualized, and maintained within MapGeo.

The Town of Cromwell, Connecticut recently requested a townwide wetlands map. Utilizing data from CT DEEP and digitized flagged wetlands from surveys to show wetland soils and the upland review areas to the wetlands 

Does your office have a street map from 5, 10, or even 15+ years ago that needs to be updated? Sanborn can update and print a new map for your space! Do those hanging tax maps or the zoning map on the wall need to be updated? Want other ideas on ways to grow your GIS? Check out our list of ideas in our support portal.

For more information or question please reach out to the support team!

What's happening at Sanborn

Sanborn at GeoWeek 2026: A Decade of Leadership and Connection – The Sanborn Map Company was proud to once again have a strong presence on the GeoWeek show floor, continuing a tradition that now spans more than a decade. GeoWeek continues to stand out as one of the geospatial industry’s premier events, bringing together more than 3,200 professionals each year to explore the technologies and ideas shaping the future of mapping, remote sensing, and spatial intelligence.