HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
A PROPERTY DATA REFORMATION
more quickly and cost-effectively. Believe it or not, there are parallels to the Protestant Reformation in the world of property data.
From Data Dictatorship to Data Democracy
The last decade has seen a technology driven philosophical shift on the use and availability of property data. Once only accessible to select gatekeepers such as multiple listing services, brokers, real estate agents, and title companies, data disrupters such as Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and RealtyTrac have been willing and able to democratize all sorts of property data to anybody with an internet connection. ATTOM Data Solutions is proud to claim this philosophy of property data disruption as part of its heritage. The forerunner to ATTOM was RealtyTrac, a company that first started posting foreclosure notices such as notices of default, notices of trustee’s sale, and bank repossessions (REO) in Southern California on the internet as early as 1996. Prior to RealtyTrac, only a select group of industry insiders had access to these foreclosure notices – which were typically mailed out on a weekly basis by title companies. Ten years later this open property data philosophy exponentially expanded to the broader market with the launch of Zillow, Trulia and Redfin in 2006. Rather than rely solely on real estate agents to provide them with listings of homes for sale, consumers could now easily access nationwide listing information in one central location. Those same websites –
“Rather than just one language only available to a few, public record property data is effectively multiple languages available to many. A multitude of county-specific languages makes it hard to merge, contrast and compare the data across different U.S. geographies.”
along with RealtyTrac and others – also eventually began including public record property data from county tax assessors and recorders, even for off-market properties not on the MLS. Harmonizing Discordant Data It’s important to note, however, that the philosophical shift toward making property data available to the masses continues to be a work in progress. On the listing side, the myriad MLSs across the country still wield significant power over the data, and in the realm of public record property data – under which foreclosure data falls – the lack of clear national data standards means
the data is messy, often delivered in thousands of format variations corresponding to the thousands of county offices sourcing the data. This problem of messy public record property data is, in a sense, the exact opposite of the problem of the Bible only being available in one language – Latin – that Luther addressed as part of his 95 theses. Rather than just one language only available to a few, public record property data is effectively multiple languages available to many. A multitude of county-specific languages makes it hard to merge, contrast and
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DECEMBER 2017 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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