CoreLogic expands property database
Property tax records tracked for 99.8% of U.S. population
By Inman News, Thursday, June 3, 2010.Information, analytics and business services provider CoreLogic Inc. announced that its property tax database now covers virtually all of the U.S. -- 3,100 counties representing 99.8 percent of the population.
"With this expansion of county coverage, CoreLogic now exceeds its closest competitor by 1,000 counties," the company said in a press release.
That unnamed competitor is Lender Processing Services, which is providing property tax records to the National Association of Realtors' Realtors Property Resource parcel-based database, a mix of public records, active and sold listings data from multiple listings services (MLSs), and other demographic information.
RPR is currently in beta testing, and company officials have said they are funding an expansion of LPS' coverage area, with the goal of achieving 100 percent coverage (see story).
"From our perspective, LPS has been beating its expansion goals over each of the two quarters since the relationship was formed, and we expect the entire expansion to be done on or ahead of schedule next year," RPR LLC President Marty Frame said in an e-mail.
Frame said that it's worth noting that in terms of population, the difference between LPS's and CoreLogic's current coverage is about 6 to 7 percent.
CoreLogic was known as First American CoreLogic before the company was spun off by title insurer First American Corp.
As of June 1, CoreLogic and First American Financial Corp. are separate, independent publicly traded companies.
CoreLogic offers a wide range of services to the real estate industry, including appraisals, property inspections, and customer relationship management, transaction management and MLS applications.
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Submitted by Victor Lund on June 3, 2010 - 2:04pm.
This is more of a question than a comment. What does it mean to have "coverage?"
Does it mean that each company has some property records from a county, or all property records in a county?
Does coverage mean that the detail of a property record is complete and that in more than 90% of america - LPS and CoreLogic have exactly the same data?
I know that there are wide differences in tax record services from area to area across the United States according to comments made by MLSs. Some MLSs praise Corelogic and others praise LPS. It would seem that the data quality is different in specific regions. WAV Group has not done any data quality comparisons - only tax system comparisons.
Does anyone know of any data quality standards for tax records? Are there any published data quality standards?
I am not trying to "stir the pot" here - both CoreLogic and LPS are solid companies with excellent management teams. My concern is that the horse race for "coverage" does not veil the need for QUALITY of tax record data needed by the real estate industry.
Victor Lund
Partner
WAV Group
http://waves.wavgroup.com
http://www.wavgroup.com
Submitted by Matt Carter on June 3, 2010 - 5:12pm.
Those are good points Victor.
There are more details in the CoreLogic press release that don't necessarily answer your questions, but are worth noting. CoreLogic claims to have:
* 98.7 percent of U.S. real estate property records
* 80 percent of mortgage applications
* 85 percent of mortgage loan servicing performance information
* 97 percent of loan level, non-agency mortgage backed securities
* 550+ million historical transaction records and data spanning more than 40 years
* The nation's largest contributory mortgage fraud database
BTW, LPS did not respond to my request for comment on CoreLogic's claims.
Submitted by Derek Eisenberg on June 15, 2010 - 7:37pm.
Matt, I find those numbers very hard to believe. They are missing numerous counties in VA and PA to name a few. I know they may be sparsely populated but even population wise I find 98.7 hard to believe.
Have you ever thought of making the posts like various blogs, list serves and facebook where you get notified whenever there is another post to something you posted on?
Derek Eisenberg
http://www.mls2u.com