Housing-News-Report-April-2018

HOUSINGNEWS REPORT

PREDICTING LIKELY EVENTS IN REAL ESTATE WITH DATA-POWERED AI

— look backwards to predict and it’s not a very viable model. It’s something we were doing back in 2007. These list optimizers, some of whom have rebranded as AI companies, use shallow neural networks with limited layers of neurons. Now we use deep learning. Deep learning has very deep neural, long neural networks. All these layers of neurons allow you to make non-linear non-sequential connections between layers. Because of all the different property data that ATTOM Data Solutions has, we started looking at other models we could train and what industries would care about those models — predicting the appearance of a notice of default, or predicting the appearance of a trustee sale. If we can predict that a month or two in advance it is highly valuable for real estate investors.

caught up to our vision, we did a soft launch in Q4 2017, providing 10 leads a week per zip code for our beta customers. We got great feedback from this launch. One customer in South Carolina knocked on 10 doors and talked to two people — both wanted to list. A Realtor in Contra Costa County, California got four really solid follow-up leads and one called back with three properties to list from one hour of cold call prospecting. The key piece of what we do is to identify the people who haven’t done anything about transacting on their home but they are thinking about it — that’s what we’ve found we’re able to predict well. I knew the predictive modeling was working when my name was highly ranked in the last run for Travis County, Texas, even though my wife and I don’t have any of the regular indicators in terms of years owned, size of home, age of children, etc. But the model was correct in that we are seriously considering a move! Why did Likely.AI decide to use ATTOM Data Solutions? We were evaluating ATTOM against another company, and really what it came down to for us was model accuracy and price. At a baseline, we wanted to make sure that our models would function as well or better with ATTOM data and that ATTOM data coverage was comparable or better than the other source. ATTOM passed this initial check with flying colors.

that were higher-quality leads based on basic property and ownership characteristics. Our fourth-generation platform, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, will narrow down that same list of 100,000 homes to just 1,000 homes that we can predict with a high degree of certainty will represent revenue-generating opportunities for our clients. When we went out and created our team we really wanted someone with that AI and machine learning expertise … that next level of guy. We got very lucky in finding somebody we had a relationship with and thus being able to go to market very quickly. How is the marketplace responding to Likely.AI products/services, specifically those integrating ATTOM data?

“There are a lot models we can create utilizing different pieces of ATTOM data. The challenge is to identify which of these models service the most industries and which industries are willing to pay the most for the models.”

We started conceptualizing these types of products as early as 2007, before the now-ubiquitous data science nomenclature even existed. We sat on it until technology and the industry caught up — when industries were willing to incorporate data into their growth strategy. Until that happened, the industry was talking about data like high schoolers talk about sex. Everybody was talking about it but nobody was really doing it. Once we believed market forces had

There are a lot models we can create utilizing different pieces of ATTOM data. The challenge is to identify which of these models service the most industries and which industries are willing to pay the most for the models. We want to be that fourth-generation marketing platform. First generation was direct marketing followed by online leads and then list optimizers who narrowed down a list of 100,000 homes to 20,000 homes

During the evaluation process we also discovered some additional datasets

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APRIL 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS

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