HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
WITH GREATER DATA ACCESS COMES GREATER DATA RESPONSIBILITY
neighborhood data, we multi-source that data from various national and regional vendors — including our own extensive network of local data abstractors. This multi-sourced approach presents a bit of a challenge for us on the data management side but ultimately is good for our customers because it allows us to deliver the most accurate and complete data picture of a property and its neighborhood. We also assign a unique, persistent ID for each of the 155 million U.S. properties in our database, allowing us to efficiently link all transactional records (sales, mortgages, foreclosures) associated with a property across multiple sources. This ATTOM ID also helps our data licensing clients more easily manage the data — keep in mind some clients receive daily updates to the data as new transactions and assessor records are added — and blend it with other datasets. As the data becomes more widely available to virtually anyone with an Internet connection, it’s more important than ever that the data is easily understandable, accurate and current.” “Greater access to public record property data is all very exciting for the industry and our clients, but with that greater access comes greater responsibility ...
the property data industry, advances in technology such exponential leaps in database storage capacity and democratized big data and analytic tools are also facilitating broader access to public record real estate data. One example is in the realm of property data APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), which are evolving from static and limited in terms of volume of calls to highly customizable and virtually unlimited when it comes to the volume and speed of calls. ATTOM is proud to be on the forefront of this evolution, with an end goal of allowing our clients to stream their own custom property data playlist with our APIs. Responsible Data Governance Greater access to public record property data is all very exciting for the industry and our clients, but with that greater access comes greater responsibility — particularly for those
an Internet connection, it’s more important than ever that the data is easily understandable, accurate and current. Here are some examples of how we’re implementing data governance best practices 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 consistently represent the same underlying data throughout the thousands of jurisdictions we cover nationwide. • Data integrity : we run manual and automated checks of individual 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
of us in the industry collecting, curating and licensing the data.
Democratizing Big Data Along with increased competition in
As the data becomes more widely available to virtually anyone with
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MAY 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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