Data access is something that the real estate industry has been dealing with since its earliest days. While the internet has fundamentally changed the way real estate professionals do almost every part of their jobs, some elements remain the same.
The insurance industry has a similar situation, where every property underwritten requires due diligence that needs all different types of data in order to be comprehensive. To that end, the completeness of property databases is just as important for insurance as for real estate. Aiming to address this challenge, data provider CoreLogic recently partnered with mapping company Ecopia to expand their “Structure Footprint” property database from around 85 million to over 169 million properties across the United States.
“The core capability of CoreLogic is gathering data from multiple sources, in multiple formats, and presenting solutions and content to users that are consistently presented and updated across geographic areas,” said Matt Karli, Senior Professional, Product Management for CoreLogic Insurance and Spatial Solutions. Instead of requiring users to bounce from database to database for zoning information, assessor’s details, and other property records, CoreLogic works to present all of the relevant property information, including Ecopia’s highly accurate building footprint data, in one place, making it easier for real estate or insurance professionals to access the information they need without wasting time on numerous sites.
CoreLogic is far from the only player active in the field, whether for real estate or insurance. Digital Map Products’ LandVision is a turnkey GIS platform that offers ownership information on a parcel-by-parcel basis, and Caliper’s Maptitude is a similar GIS platform with numerous features specifically for the insurance industry, such as census data. For CoreLogic’s part, Structure Footprint focuses on physical building attributes.
“We assign all sub-addresses associated with a structure as well as proprietary property attributes such as gross square footage, land use, number of stories, and year built. This allows clients to gain a better understanding of what those structures are and how they are being utilized. This added level of location intelligence is especially beneficial when assessing risk to commercial buildings within multi-structure business parks or college campuses, as it identifies the structure’s precise location as it relates to the parcel boundary, other structures and natural hazard risks,” Matt said.
CoreLogic’s new property data offering comes by way of Ecopia’s map-based building footprint database. CoreLogic takes in all this geographic information and adds their own property data to each record, creating a fully fleshed-out property record. Data like this has users beyond insurance and real estate, with professionals in disaster risk mitigation also taking advantage of similar databases.