The world of real estate and housing is about to change, as consumers and operators within the industry are about to have more information available at their fingertips than ever before.
That information will be made available starting Tuesday by Attom Data Solutions, the company formerly known as RealtyTrac.
RealtyTrac, a provider of comprehensive property data, announced Tuesday morning that it is launching a massive rebranding of the company, and will be known moving forward as Attom Data Solutions.
But this is more than just a rebrand, Attom Data Solutions CEO Rob Barber said in an interview with HousingWire.
“This is not just a rebranding. It’s far more than that. The rebranding is the result of something more fundamental that’s happening,” Barber said. “This is the completion of an almost two-year effort to build an entirely new and innovative data property warehouse.”
Attom Data Solutions will operate as the umbrella for RealtyTrac, Home Disclosure, and Homefacts.
And Attom Data Solutions will use those three sources of property data as well as countless other sources to create the Attom Data Warehouse, which, according to the company, makes more information about a single property available than has ever been available from one source.
According to Barber, the development of the Attom Data Warehouse is truly the result of a four-year process that shifted RealtyTrac away from its original business focus of providing a real estate search experience for the “niche” market of foreclosures to becoming a provider of all-encompassing property data.
The shift began with the acquisition of Homefacts, which provides property risk information that is “relevant to people looking to purchase homes,” Barber said.
For RealtyTrac, the acquisition of Homefacts brought with it a national environmental database, natural hazard and risk information, registered sex offender data, and relevant neighborhood information, like school quality and crime statistics, Barber said.
Add in national tax deed and mortgage information licensed from CoreLogic, as part of an agreement related to the CoreLogic’s acquisition of DataQuick, and RealtyTrac shifted from being only focused on foreclosures to providing comprehensive data on all properties.
And now, the company is taking all of that data to the next level.
For the last two years, Barber said, the company has been unifying that data from hundreds of different sources into a single, national “holistic property data warehouse.”
The Attom Data Warehouse provides enhanced and standardized data for more than 150 million U.S. property parcels, which represents an expanded footprint that covers 99% of the U.S. population, the company said.
“Everything we do is about trying to increase transparency in real estate,” Barber said. “This is most comprehensive view of a property, and it’s more accessible than it’s even been.
“So I can look up your house (for example) and pull up everything that you would want to know, regardless of the source of the data, all of the relevant information about your home," Barber said."All of your property’s tax history, ownership history, deed history, environmental characteristics, foreclosure status, its proximity to any number of different natural hazards, like earthquake, flood and fire zones, neighborhood characteristic information about schools and crime, building permits – all of it is now available in one search.”
And all of it is accessible via the ATTOM ID, a unique identifier for every property in the country.
“The new ATTOM ID is an innovation long-overdue in the real estate data industry, linking all property-centric data from myriad sources to one unique parcel identifier, and it’s just one example of how the new ATTOM Data Warehouse creates value for our customers and elevates our industry” Barber said.
“Under the new ATTOM Data Solutions brand, our mission as a company will continue to be increasing real estate transparency for businesses and consumers,” Barber continued. “That mission will be carried out in a variety of venues, including bulk file licenses, APIs and customized reports, along with our increasingly popular consumer websites.
"What we are doing and what our customers are doing represents the most cutting-edge application of data science in the real estate space," Barber said.
