HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
SPLITTING THE ATTOM
The API Economy A parallel trajectory has occurred in other industry verticals and has led to the rise of third-party API companies specializing in creating what TechCrunch calls “critical connective tissue” between content providers and developers to deliver applications providing integrated and data-rich experiences to end-users. Some of the emerging leaders in this new API economy include companies like Twilio (communications), Stripe (payments), and SalesForce (CRM). This is creating an environment of connected applications that can be built and modified quickly and leverage best-of-breed components and data. Meanwhile a similar — if admittedly slower and less sexy — evolution is taking place in the world of property data.
The majority of public record property data is still delivered to enterprise clients in bulk files via file transfer, somewhat akin to the CD delivery method for music 20 years ago. There has been some progress in recent years, much of it around leveraging APIs. Real Estate-Centric APIs There are a growing number of real estate-centric APIs that have been built over the past 10 years, providing developers access to very specific nuggets of real estate data. Those include the Zestimate, WalkScore, UtilityScore and ClearCapital’s property appraisals. ATTOM Data Solutions has its own set of public record property APIs that include a basic property profile, property history, AVM, and sales comps among others.
But frankly these static, predefined APIs are limited and do not make the breadth of ATTOM Data Warehouse available to our customers. Returning to the music delivery metaphor, it’s as if just a handful of well-worn music genres were available for streaming on Spotify; maybe just classical, rock, rap, jazz and alternative. But the entire spectrum of musical genres with all their nuance and color — brostep, drone folk, gauze pop, medieval rock, and vegan straight edge are just a few of the more creatively named genres on Spotify — are not available to stream. Clients would have to license Spotify’s entire music library to get at the eclectic set of genres and individual songs important to them — if those songs didn’t fit into any of the five pre-determined genres available for streaming.
There are a growing number of real estate-centric APIs that have been built over the past 10 years, providing developers access to very specific nuggets of real estate data. ATTOM Data Solutions has its own set of public record property APIs that include a basic property profile, property history, AVM, and sales comps among others.”
JUNE 2017
ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS • P18
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