High-Quality Real Estate Data is More Important Than Ever in 2024
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are having a major impact on the real estate industry. Less than a decade ago, real estate professionals had few options for leveraging predictive analytics technology, let alone securing quality real estate data. Now there are products to automatically extract data from documents, pull various property data sources together and even predict investment performance.
Access to high-quality data allows real estate professionals to understand the wants and needs of prospective residents, facilitates more accurate valuations, and leads to smarter investment decisions. By leveraging predictive analytics with quality data, real estate investors, developers and brokers can forecast demographic and economic changes, identify underserved markets, and optimize value-add and development strategies.
The only problem is, in 2024, there are so many sources of real estate data available that it can be hard to determine the best data providers for your needs.
The team at HelloData has been working with demographic, economic, rent and property valuation data sources for many years, so we put together a list of sources for real estate data that everyone in the industry should be familiar with. We break the data sources into four categories:
- Property Ownership & Assessor Data – These include data on the current owner of the property, what they pay in taxes, lot sizes, approved uses and building materials are characteristic of these sources.
- Commercial Real Estate Data – These sources include rent and transaction data on multifamily apartments, hotels, offices, retail and industrial properties. Attributes like building size, rent per sqft, last sale price and current tenants are typical from these sources.
- Single-Family Housing Data – SFR data sources provide detail on listing and sales prices and trends, absorption rates, listing descriptions, floorplans and tons of property photos.
- Demographic & Economic Data Sources – Includes data aggregated from sources like the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, as well as proprietary data from surveys of local business owners and field research.
In this post, we’ll describe the top sources in each category and provide an overview of what each source offers.
Best Sources for Property Ownership & Tax Assessor Data
CoreLogic is a leading global property information, analytics, and data-enabled services provider. The company specializes in providing detailed and comprehensive information regarding property ownership, tax assessor data, and a wide range of other property-related information. CoreLogic serves real estate and mortgage professionals, as well as insurance companies, financial institutions, and government agencies, providing them with critical data to make informed decisions.
CoreLogic stands out as a premier data provider due to its unique blend of comprehensive data, analytics, workflow technology, advisory, and managed services. This multifaceted approach allows CoreLogic to deliver significant value to its clients by assisting them in identifying and managing growth opportunities, enhancing performance, and mitigating risks. The company's dedication to leveraging unique data insights and analytics ensures that clients can make informed decisions with greater confidence, particularly in realms where accurate and deep data analysis is critical for success.
Its extensive property database, which includes detailed property information, ownership history, tax records, liens, and more, provides users with in-depth insights into properties of interest. Derived from a mix of public, contributory, and proprietary sources, their database spans over 4.5 billion records and more than 50 years. This comprehensive coverage equips users with unparalleled access to property, mortgage, and other essential data, making CoreLogic an invaluable resource for real estate professionals, financial institutions, insurance carriers, and government agencies looking to make informed decisions within the housing market.
Black Knight also has a property database covers an impressive 99.9% of the U.S. population, reflecting an unparalleled breadth and depth of data. Collected directly from county assessors’ offices nationwide, their data is carefully verified and updated by the Black Knight team to ensure its accuracy and reliability. Its comprehensive coverage and dedication to data integrity make Black Knight a trusted source for real estate professionals seeking detailed and current property information.
What sets Black Knight apart from CoreLogic is their specialized focus on mortgage and real estate analytics, backed by a technology platform that caters specifically to the mortgage lending, servicing, and real estate industries. While CoreLogic offers a broad range of data and analytics services across various sectors, Black Knight concentrates on delivering high-performance software, data, and analytics solutions that support the entire homeownership lifecycle.
This focus enables Black Knight to provide targeted solutions and insights that are highly relevant to stakeholders in the mortgage and real estate sectors, differentiating them from CoreLogic's broader approach.
First American Data Tree LLC provides property data and document images to mortgage and real estate-related businesses. The company searches, discovers, and shares the property-centric information contained in public records, recorded documents, title plants, and other robust data sources.
First American Data Tree, a subsidiary of First American Financial Corporation, distinguishes itself as a robust real estate data provider through its expansive database and innovative technology. Data Tree by First American offers instant access to a comprehensive database that includes the nation's largest collection of digital public land records and over 7 billion recorded land document images. This extensive database is a testament to First American's commitment to providing users with detailed and reliable property data, which is instrumental for a variety of real estate, lending, and legal professionals.
What differentiates First American Data Tree from competitors like CoreLogic and Black Knight is its focus on combining best-in-class technology with the largest database of its kind. This approach ensures that users have access to the most current and accurate property, homeowner, and mortgage data available, thereby enabling them to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently.
Unlike CoreLogic, which has a broader data and analytics service portfolio, and Black Knight, which specializes in mortgage and real estate analytics, First American Data Tree leverages its parent company's vast resources to focus specifically on property data and document images, providing a unique value proposition in the real estate data market.
Attom provides robust real estate data, foreclosure, boundary, listings data and more for over 155 million residential and commercial properties throughout the U.S. It offers a comprehensive solution including neighborhood data, property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, listings, boundaries, natural hazards, school, and environmental risks.
The vast array of data includes information on foreclosure, boundaries, listings, neighborhood data, property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, and more. Their commitment to providing analytics-ready property data along with flexible delivery solutions sets ATTOM apart by catering to a wide range of users, from investors and real estate agents to financial institutions and insurance companies.
The differentiation of ATTOM from competitors like CoreLogic, Black Knight, and First American Data Tree lies in its innovative approach to data aggregation and its advanced Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) system.
ATTOM aggregates information from a variety of sources, offering a holistic view of the property landscape. This aggregation is enhanced by their DaaS system and bulk data licensing options, which facilitate seamless data access and integration across different sectors.
Unlike CoreLogic's broad data and analytics service portfolio, Black Knight's focus on mortgage and real estate analytics, and First American Data Tree's emphasis on property data and document images, ATTOM provides a unique blend of comprehensive data coverage and innovative technological solutions, enabling users to access and utilize real estate data more efficiently and effectively
ATTOM also acquired Estated in 2022, bolstering its API offerings and helping it expand its presence in the startup ecosystem.
Best Sources for Commercial Real Estate Data
CoStar is the leading commercial real estate data provider in the US with a vast database of information, including sales and lease comps, listings, vacancies, rents, tenants, ownership, and market trends. It offers access to 390 markets and 2,700 submarkets, with custom analytics for specific commercial property data sets, such as geography, building class, and sales information.
What sets CoStar apart from other data providers is its dedication to maintaining the largest and most comprehensive database of commercial real estate information in North America. This is achieved through expansive, ongoing research efforts to produce and maintain up-to-date data covering a wide array of CRE aspects.
The company's commitment to data accuracy and depth, combined with its innovative technology platform, enables clients to access a wealth of information, including detailed property records, transaction histories, and market analytics. This level of detail and scope supports a broad spectrum of users in the CRE industry, from investors and brokers to appraisers and property managers, distinguishing CoStar as a valuable resource for anyone involved in commercial real estate.
A product of Moody's acquisition of Reis, Moody’s Analytics provides insight into major US commercial real estate markets through proprietary data and advanced analytics. It allows users to view real estate data at the property, submarket, and market-level, and includes a searchable database for real-time reporting.
Moody's Analytics' recognition within the industry, receiving accolades like Credit Data Provider of the Year at the Risk Technology Awards, underscores its impact and reliability in providing data and analytics. The company's commitment to innovation is further highlighted by the development of Moody's DataHub, a next-generation data delivery platform. This platform exemplifies Moody's Analytics' dedication to enhancing the data user experience, enabling users to access and analyze data more efficiently.
CompStak was the first crowdsourced commercial real estate database. It collects verified and standardized comps from professionals in leading brokerages and appraisal firms. It offers powerful analytics and high data integrity, offering contributors incentives for updating and correcting comp data. CompStak is a good source for comp data that can't be found anywhere else.
RCA focuses on providing ongoing deals, historical information, and market analytics. It also offers insightful market information about key players, transactions, and investors, and provides in-depth analysis of market transactions and enables users to uncover property owners, attributes, and debt terms. It was recently acquired by MSCI for $950M in cash, which should tell you a bit about the quality of its data!
CREXi’s goal is to streamline the entire real estate transaction process online. It recently launched CREXi Intelligence, an extensive database subscription that offers powerful mapping tools, allowing users to view population, median income, traffic count, and points of interest data on top of listings and comps for more in-depth analysis.
Reonomy is a CRE data provider that utilizes AI and machine learning to identify property opportunities. It gathers data from a wide range of resources to evaluate deals and market potential, displaying up to 100 data points for any given asset, such as renovation details, sales history, and comps. There are approximately 50 million commercial properties listed on Reonomy's platform.
Best Sources for Single-Family Housing Data
The realtor.com real estate data library is available for free to real estate professionals and provides structured data for database use. The information includes metrics for various geographic locations down to the zip code level, based on the most comprehensive and accurate MLS-listed for-sale home databases in the industry. Realtor.com aggregates and analyzes data from various sources to produce reliable and comparable market figures and trends.
NAR is a reliable source of housing statistics and data, including national, regional, and metro-market level information. It produces data-backed reports and surveys on topics such as housing affordability, pending home sales, and buyer and seller profiles, and presents the information in an easily digestible format.
NAHB provides insights into the housing market by compiling popular regional and local tables, such as permit data, employment information, and new and existing homes sold by region. It offers “Housing Economics”, a free publication, and “Housing Economics PLUS”, a subscription-based service, to provide comprehensive historical and current statistics, including housing stats, homes sold by region, and new construction value.
Zillow is a great free resource for single-family housing data. Its Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) is a useful tool for real estate professionals to track market changes across regions and housing types. Zillow publishes the ZHVI for single-family residences, condos/coops, and homes with 1-5+ bedrooms, and it is optimized for timeliness, comprehensiveness, and visibility.
As a leading provider of mortgage financing, Fannie Mae is a trusted source of data in the real estate industry. In September, the company's Economic & Strategic Research Group launched the Fannie Mae Home Purchase Sentiment Index (HPSI) to provide signals about the direction of the housing market and help professionals and investors make informed decisions.
Best Sources for Demographic & Economic Data
The ACS is an ongoing survey providing socioeconomic data for states, counties, and other jurisdictions and creates period estimates, which represent characteristics of the population and housing over a specific period of data collection. 1-year ACS estimates provide 12 months of collected data for areas with populations of 65,000 or more, 3-year ACS estimates provide 36 months of data for areas with populations of 20,000 or more, and five-year estimates provide 60 months of collected data for all areas.
Data.Census.Gov (previously American Fact Finder) provides basic data on population, housing, economic, and geographic information in the form of tables and maps for the United States, states, counties, cities, towns, American Indian reservations, Puerto Rico, and the island areas. Community Facts offers tables or maps of such information for states and counties, and cities, towns, or zip codes of sufficient size to make reasonably reliable estimates.
The Consumer Expenditure Survey provides data on expenditures, income, and demographic characteristics of consumers in the United States in tables, databases, news releases, reports, and public-use microdata files. Published tables provide Consumer Expenditure Survey data by classifications that include income quintile, income decile, income class, age of reference person, size of consumer unit, number of earners, composition of consumer unit, region of residence, housing tenure, type of area (urban-rural), race, Hispanic origin, occupation, and highest education level of any member.
By collecting and analyzing data from a combination of government and private sources, City-Data.com produces detailed, informative profiles for every city in the US. Whether it’s crime rates or weather patterns, City-Data.com helps real estate professionals narrow in on a variety of factors on a state-by-state level. The site’s interactive data map also helps industry professionals visualize the data they are looking at. Users can target the state, city, county or region they’re in and get the data they need.
How HelloData.ai Can Help with Your Real Estate Data Processing Needs
HelloData.ai was founded by a passionate team of data scientists and engineers with proven real estate domain expertise to help real estate owners, managers and PropTech companies build data-driven products. We’ve built real estate data, data pipelines, predictive algorithms and workflow automation technology for startups, publicly traded companies, and everything in between.
Our suite of APIs helps real estate professionals and software providers bring real-time data on more than 3.5M properties and 30M units from across the U.S. into their databases and applications. Learn more about our platform through the links below:
