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Rob Barber CEO of ATTOMData Solutions (formerly RealtyTrac) Rob Barber joined RealtyTrac as CEO in 2015, spearheaded the creation of the ATTOM Data Warehouse and the company’s subsequent rebranding as ATTOM Data Solutions in 2016. As CEO of ATTOM Data Solutions, Rob directs the ongoing curation of America’s most comprehensive property database, product innovation that leverages the company’s data, data sales, data licensing and customer service.
DEMOCRATIZING DATA: TOWARDS REAL ESTATE TRANSPARENCY
One-Stop Shop Slowing growth rates and evolving customer needs motivated these niche players to re-examine their growth strategies. No longer could acceptable growth be attained by operating solely within a single core niche. After all, customers had diverse information needs that spanned multiple sectors and were sourcing data from multiple suppliers. Because managing many such relationships was expensive and time consuming, customers began consolidating relationships around suppliers that could meet many, if not all, of their needs. These forces motivated leading property data companies to leverage their existing data sourcing, quality control, data warehousing and sales capabilities and extend them into adjacent markets leading to the formation of several holistic and nationally comprehensive real estate data warehouses. What’s Next As real estate continues its evolution toward total and inevitable transparency, the next stage of the journey will be built upon four pillars. First, property data companies will transition beyond data that describes a property’s past to also source data that quantifies a property’s current characteristics. Smart, connected technologies are now able to capture real-time performance data that measures everything from energy usage to water consumption to indoor air quality. Furthermore, once captured for an individual property, this data can be easily compared to similar properties. Whether a result
Someday soon, buying real estate will be as smooth and fast as buying a car, stock or bond. And it will happen because innovative companies are making real estate more transparent every day. Whether you’re a business or a consumer, decisions related to real estate are some of the most important and challenging decisions you’ll ever make. They’re important decisions because they have a significant impact on income, wealth and quality of life. And they’re difficult decisions because information that can assist in making more informed real estate decisions is multi-dimensional, complex and often scattered. But despite the historically distributed nature of real estate data, much of this information has now been consolidated and made easily accessible to anyone. Specialized Niches In the early 1990s, new types of information companies were born, most of which specialized in a particular category of property data. Some companies aggregated for-sale listings. Some focused on past transactions. Some collected land and environmental data. At first, these niche companies collected property data in limited geographies and later expanded nationally. As each niche segment matured, one or two firms inevitably separated themselves from the pack, achieved scale and emerged as the class of their niche. And at roughly this point, their growth began to plateau.
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