Choosing a real estate data provider can be one of the most important operational decisions for your business. Obtaining accurate data requires a significant financial commitment, and the success of the organization is often predicated on the quality of the data.
Outdated and inaccurate data can have a severe impact on business operations. It goes well beyond the frustration of calling a phone number that’s out of service. Unreliable data can be the cause of wasted time and financial losses.
For a business that relies on high volume outbound calling, unreliable data can lead to having your calls flagged as spam. Once this occurs, the number of potential leads answering your outbound calls will decrease sharply, leading to sales team burnout and employee turnover.
If you use a data provider to populate your website or application, flawed data can lead to negative reviews and customer churn. Regardless of the exact role that real estate data plays in your business, bad data can and will cost you in multiple ways. That’s why it’s so important to be able to verify the quality of a real estate data provider. Bad data can impede a business’s growth and decimate the impact of its marketing efforts.
Fortunately, potential clients don’t have to hire a real estate data provider and then wait to discover the true quality of their data. When it comes to evaluating real estate data providers, there are five specific criteria that you should look at.
Accuracy
Accuracy is the most important factor when evaluating a real estate data provider. One of the primary determinants of accuracy is your provider’s proximity to the data source. The more channels or vendors that the data has to go through in order to make its way to the client, the greater the opportunity for errors. Conversely, the closer your data provider is to the source of information, the more reliable it will be. At BatchData, we obtain real estate listing data straight from the source, versus a third-party provider.
Data latency can also affect the accuracy of your data. In this context, “latency” refers to how often data is updated. Due to the complexity and the volume of data, your provider should be updating their real estate data at least daily in order to keep pace with the rapidly changing market.
Verification
Another way to determine accuracy is to determine if your data provider has their own verification processes. At BatchData, we run our own tests to verify the accuracy of our data. We routinely compare our data to information from county recorders’ and assessors’ offices and pre foreclosure notices, among many other sources. We also routinely compare our real estate listing data to our competitors’ data and have found that BatchData’s accuracy is higher than that of our competitors.
If you are evaluating different real estate data providers and have the resources to do so, we encourage you to request sample data and independently verify that the information is accurate. This can be a labor-intensive process, so we recommend using virtual assistants for this task.
Delivery
Data is meant to be utilized, not just exist as a huge file. While bulk data delivery may work best for some clients, others may prefer to ingest the data via an application programming interface (API). When evaluating a real estate data provider, determine what delivery options are available and not only if they’ll meet your current needs but also scale with your business as it grows.
When evaluating an API, you’ll also want to know which architectures are available. This is referred to as “data pushes” versus “data pulls”. A data push is information that you receive from your data provider automatically, while a data pull refers to data that the client requests. Ask the data provider about their processes for data pulls and pushes.
It’s also important to ask potential data providers what types of variables can be implemented in data reporting. For example, is your data provider able to filter for 3-bedroom residences in pre-foreclosure in a given area? What about property liens, properties in probate, or properties that have been vacated? It’s helpful to know whether data with these types of specifications can be delivered to you or if you’re responsible for searching for this information within your data.
Professional Services
Two real estate data providers may be equally matched in terms of the quality of their data, so next you need to evaluate how user-friendly their data is. That’s when you evaluate the quality of the providers’ professional services.
Here are four ways you can leverage professional services to get more from your data investment:
- Setup
Determine requirements and objectives to get the most from your data integration
- Development
Meet the unique needs of your business with custom design, implementation, and reporting
- Enrichment
Augment your data with property, contact, and demographic data while eliminating duplicates or inconsistencies
- Consultation
The process of optimizing your data with custom analysis, reporting, and expert advice
Depth
Depth of the data refers to how many data points are being provided and the quality of the data provided by those sources. Real estate data providers that use a single data source are at an operational disadvantage, while providers with multi-sourced data are able to offer richer insights and compensate for any information gaps.
At BatchService, we don’t have a single source for our data. That means that we don’t have a single point of failure when it comes to data sources, nor do we have a single source of truth.
Our depth of data allows us to backfill data. To illustrate how this works, we can use the example of certain counties in Florida where there is no requirement to report bedroom and bathroom counts to the county assessor’s department. If one were to use a data provider that only sourced data from the assessor, this important information would be missing.
At BatchData, we backfill the information from those particular counties with real estate listing data. Property listings always offer the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, so the gap in reporting from the assessor’s office isn’t a problem for our clients. Even if a property is not currently on the market, if it’s been an active listing withing the past 20 years, we can can backfill the data with historic listing information.
Conclusion
The quality of your data can have a major impact on operations and ultimately your business performance. Being able to ask a potential data provider precise questions about their services will ensure that you don’t partner with a data provider that over-promises and under-delivers.
At BatchData, we are driven to provide the most current and in-depth data possible to our clients by analyzing information from more than 7 billion records. Our rigorous focus on data quality and the customer experience empowers our clients to use our data with confidence.
To learn more about our data offering or request a free consultation, click here.
