Think-Realty-Magazine-July-2018

GREATERACCESS TO PUBLIC RECORD PROPERTYDATA IS ALLVERYEXCITING FORTHE INDUSTRY

ANDOUR CLIENTS, BUT WITHTHATGREATER ACCESS COMES GREATER RESPONSIBILITY ... AS THE DATABECOMES VIRTUALLYANYONE WITHAN INTERNET CONNECTION, IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THANEVERTHAT THE DATA IS EASILY UNDERSTANDABLE, ACCURATEAND CURRENT.” MOREWIDELY AVAILABLETO

to accomplish these data responsibility objectives at ATTOM: • Data translation: because we’re multi-sourcing the data, we often end up with a variety of different names for different fields of data, or the same name for different fields. We carefully translate the naming conventions and their meanings so that ultimately our clients can be confident that the field names consis- tently represent the same underlying data throughout the thousands of jurisdictions we cover nationwide. • Data integrity: we run manual and automated checks of individu- al property records to identify and correct inconsistencies in a property’s data story. For example, if we receive

a property record with 20 bathrooms that is categorized as a single-family home, most likely one of those fields is not correct so we check back with the original source to verify or correct. • Data currency: outdated data means risky data, so we run weekly coverage reports checking the currency of data in the more than 3,000 jurisdictions we collect from nationwide. If currency falls behind in a jurisdiction we prompt the source to bring the data up to date, and if needed secure a new source for that jurisdiction.

tion around public record real estate data, it falls largely to the property data industry to take responsibility for the governance of the data — so that an important, but del- icate, balance between data transparency and data privacy can be maintained. The biggest change I’ve seen in my more than two decades in the property data industry is a heightened sensitivity to privacy concerns. This of course is a natural response to the greater visibility of the public record property data, par- ticularly on consumer-facing real estate portals such as Zillow, Trulia, Realtor. com and RealtyTrac, which is owned and powered by ATTOM Data Solutions. Homeowners have understandably become more pro-active in providing feedback on the accuracy of the data pertaining to their home and — in some cases where public individuals or law

enforcement are involved — requesting that data be suppressed. This is forc- ing the industry to up the ante when it comes to data accuracy and quality. The 90 percent accuracy rate that was acceptable in the industry when I first started will no longer cut it; minimum acceptable accuracy rates now are 95 to 96 percent. Our tolerance for error as an industry has decreased, and that’s a good thing for our clients and ultimate- ly for consumers. PLUG-AND-PLAY PROPERTY DATA Robust data governance is mission critical for organizations like ATTOM that are collecting, curating and licensing public record property and neighbor- hood data. For us, data governance is not

a siloed department, but is implemented company-wide, fully integrated into each pillar of our data infrastructure: 1. Data security 2. Data compliance 3. Data storage 4. Data management 5. Data delivery This fully integrated approach to data governance ensures that data licensing clients are ingesting premium property and neighborhood data that they can confidently plug into their products, software and applications with little or no additional data management on their end. Plug-and-play data, grounded in responsible data governance, allows cli- ents to reduce risk while also elevating the experience for their end-users. •

THE TRANSPARENCY- PRIVACY TENSION Given the limited government regula-

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