The promise of PropTech—and one of the chief factors driving multi-billion-dollar valuations of PropTech start-ups—is the potential to re-imagine the real estate ecosystem. Hardly a week goes by without an announcement that a new player is re-inventing some aspect of real estate sales or financing: for example, property visualization, valuation and “video” home staging.
PropTechs are also filling market gaps and solving consumer challenges with innovative iBuying, leasing and shared equity concepts.
Being “first to market” with a new solution can often mean the difference between success (an IPO or SPAC deal) or also-ran status. That means finding the partners—particularly real estate data providers—that understand your concept and can engage quickly is critical. At the same time, quality and freshness of the data takes an increased importance when you’re putting your balance sheet, or investors’ capital, on the line.
So, how can you ensure that you have the best data at the right time? The answer is “old school.” Conduct smart and thorough due diligence that probes the critical aspects of one data intelligence source vs. another.
Here’s a sample set of questions to consider when you’re choosing a data and analytics provider to power these innovative tools:
- What is the breadth and depth of data available and can it be tailored to your needs?
- How fresh is the data? For example, what’s the lag time between the actual date of a transaction and when that data can be fed into your platform or updated in analytic modeling workflows?
- What kind of unique datasets are available to you that another competing data provider can’t provide without delaying data delivery? Examples include HOA data, active listings, liens or spatial offerings, like First American’s True Rooftop.
- How much experience in managing and curating massive property and ownership datasets do the companies have? One or two years? Or decades?
- Is the data provider just harvesting and combining data or are they taking the “hard steps” to ensure it is curated properly and is consumable in the form that you need?
- Will the provider actively engage with you to create and investigate new possibilities that you may not have considered?
- Finally, is the provider’s data accepted in the industry as suitable to support critical business functions?
The next step, after you’ve addressed your core questions with each provider, might be a “champion/challenger” evaluation or “data bake-off” to measure performance and determine data quality.
Once you’ve answered all these questions, then you’re ready to make an informed decision.
First American Data & Analytics is a leader in powering some of the most innovative PropTech companies across the country. We are actively engaged with our PropTech partners—solving licensing, delivery, and processing challenges to help them turn re-imagination into reality.
Our massive datasets are the industry’s most complete, and cover a broad range of property, ownership, tax, and valuation data. Our patented OCR technology and our sophisticated data management skills allow us to capture every element in a real estate transaction, pulling from the more than 5 million new document images that are added each month to our industry-leading document repository of 7 billion images.
We also have data that is not available through other data sources, such as spatial and master address. We can provide data and insight in a variety of forms and delivery systems, including the cloud.
Finally, our data is used in connection with underwriting decisions everyday, so managing our data content, completeness and quality are the foundation of our assets. To learn more visit: First American Data & Analytics
