RealtyTrac has rebranded its parent company Attom Data Solutions alongside the launch of a new property database called the Attom Data Warehouse.
The Attom name is a play on the periodic table of elements, Rob Barber, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based company, said in an interview.
"The name came from the concept that the property data that we've been collecting and enhancing over the last couple of years; we use the periodic table of elements as a metaphor," he said. "Every property has its own unique set of characteristics that make it different from other properties, and the Attom Data Warehouse has become the largest single national property warehouse that contains a myriad of property attributes."
The available data includes current and historical property tax assessor information, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, health hazard and neighborhood characteristics, among others. Each one of these typically has a different identification number in their original databases. With the Data Warehouse, the company was able to map the information to a unique Attom ID for each property, Barber said. With that ID, users can link back through the database to the original information source.
The company will retain its three consumer-facing websites, RealtyTrac.com, Homefacts.com and HomeDisclosure.com, but the main website will be known as Attomdata.com, and users can link to those individual websites directly through it.
"What they all have in common: all of these businesses are about increasing real estate transparency and all of these products leverage the same database, the Attom Warehouse," Barber said.
RealtyTrac is the most well-known of these brands and Attom will "continue to operate and invest in that business. It will continue to remain laser-focused on providing real estate search and research services to those interested in foreclosure and other distressed properties," said Barber. But RealtyTrac is "one product that exists within a portfolio of data products under the Attom Data Solutions parent company brand."
The genesis for the data warehouse project started about four years ago when a strategic decision was made to begin pivoting away from being a niche operator and to become more of a business-to-business data company, Barber said.
The first step was the acquisition of HomeFacts, which brought into the company neighborhood and risk data, environmental data, natural hazard data, crime data and other similar information.
The second big step was two years ago when RealtyTrac began selling national assessor and recorder bulk data that it licenses from CoreLogic. The agreement was a regulatory condition of
The creation of the Data Warehouse is the third step that builds upon those earlier steps, he said.
Attom built the Data Warehouse on the Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and its cloud computing environment, called Azure.
"Processes that ran 24 hours on our old platform came back in less than three hours. The ability to generate the files much faster, and apply updates more quickly has definitely increased our ability to serve more complicated data sets," according to Richard Sawicky, chief data officer at Attom Data Solutions in a company press release.
The rebrand follows similar efforts at Auction.com, which
