HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
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Housing Precogs: Big Data Predictions Beyond Heuristic Hunches
BY PETER MILLER, STAFF WRITER
Real estate used to be a game of hunches. People bought and sold property because they had a sense of pricing, timing, and marketplace trends. Mortgages were made in large measure on the basis of past performance. Today heuristic hunches are out, big data is in, and the artificial intelligence revolution is taking the real estate world by storm with the promise of
better leads and early access to future inventory — translating into lower costs, less risk and bigger profits for the industry. The move away from housing market hunches to sophisticated predictive real estate analytics based on big data principles is led by a growing group of housing precogs that are relative newcomers to the industry with strong ties to Silicon Valley and
funded largely by venture capital. “We use predictive analytics and machine learning to analyze how likely a homeowner is to sell in the near future,” said Avi Gupta, President and CEO at SmartZip Analytics. “These techniques look at historical data — who has sold in the past — to identify, from several thousand data attributes, which ones may have been a factor in triggering those sales. And then, they
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MAY 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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