AiThority Interview Series with Richard Sawicky, Chief Data Officer at Attom Data Solutions

Tell us about your technological interaction with data and other intelligent technologies that you work with?

ATTOM Data Solutions provides premium property data to power products that improve transparency, innovation, efficiency and disruption in a data-driven economy. ATTOM multi-source’s property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties covering 99 percent of the nation’s population. A rigorous data management process involving more than 20 steps validates, standardizes and enhances the data we collect, then we assign each property record a persistent, unique ID — the ATTOM ID. This process ensures we deliver the highest quality and most usable property data to our customers.

ATTOM also incorporates several ML models to process entity classification scenarios as well as a predictive model to calculate home value. ATTOM has established a robust data catalog to document our semantic model and map logical product facing to physical structures.

Today’s enterprises want data to be the foundation of their business. How can businesses benefit from ATTOM’s data services solutions?

ATTOM arms businesses and consumers with the property data needed to make wise decisions through our innovative products that leverage the ATTOM Data Warehouse and our data delivery platforms. We’re one of the first property data providers to offer  (Daas), a cloud-based technology that streamlines data management. In the ATTOM DaaS solution, data from the ATTOM data warehouse becomes a client’s own private warehouse and provides them with a fully managed database hosted in the cloud. No flat files are downloaded and ingested, and you simply access the data directly. Daily updates and data fixes are managed and applied automatically. ATTOM manages the data and the platform, letting you focus on your business.

It is the goal of ATTOM Data to provide a rich pallet of services on which to build your next data project. ATTOM DaaS fulfills this goal by offering a wide array of Azure that extends you data estate with no infrastructure to manage, minimal administrative tasks and flexible processing power to suite your workload.

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Tell us a little about the broad array of your data solutions?

We offer flexible data delivery solutions to meet unique business needs, with customizable options, including bulk file licenses, APIs, market trends, marketing lists, match & append and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).

With our bulk data licensing, our advanced technology facilitates data collection and maintenance from multiple sources on a proprietary, reliable platform to create the most complete property data superset available.

Our API platform provides real-time data access through a direct connection with our client’s existing software, websites and apps making data retrieval and display a seamless process.

We also offer a variety of pre-configured real estate market trends with the option to define the deliverables to meet their company’s objectives, mixing and matching the data to fit their particular business needs.

Our marketing lists deliver high-value prospects by combining the power of homeowner information to find the leads that convert to sales, from property status, owner-occupied data, etc., to detailed loan data such as interest rate type.

With match & append, the critical component is the ATTOM ID, which is matched to customer input (usually an address), and delivers greater accuracy, better coverage and a higher match rate in a shorter period of time.

With ATTOM DaaS, the integrated platform alleviates the burdens of planning and executing a data project by greatly simplifying the loading, managing, and integration of large data sets. ATTOM manages the data and the platform, letting you focus on your business.

How are ATTOM’s turnkey solutions helping businesses?

From ATTOM’s Real Estate Market Trend reports to ATTOM DaaS, clients have the option to define the deliverables to meet their company’s objectives, mixing and matching the data to fit their particular business needs.

What industries can leverage from ATTOM’s Services and Solutions?

The 9TB ATTOM Data Warehouse fuels innovation in many industries, including mortgage – banks and nonbanks, online lending platforms, mortgage brokers and originators and servicers; real estate search portals, brokers, MLSs, transaction platforms and title companies; insurance carriers and myriad companies providing specialty services to the insurance industry; d*************** mail list brokers, online lead generation services, list optimizers and AI-based list platforms; and various data analytic verticals that depend on real estate and environmental data as well as academia and government research organizations.

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The Cloud has substantially eased data management for enterprises? How does ATTOM ensure the storage and security of sensitive data?

Our focus on cloud-based technologies over the past year has been solidified with the following milestones:

• In August 2018, we developed and brought to market a cloud-based property data API that provides clients with more flexible and scalable options for property and community data delivery in a one-stop-shop solution.
• In October 2018, we successfully completed a 50 Terabyte migration to Microsoft’s Azure Platform through our partnership with Denny Cherry & Associates. With this announcement, our national real estate database was moved onto the cloud, enabling more flexible data management and expedited delivery to bulk licensing clients.
• In March 2019, we launched ATTOM DaaS, a publishing platform combined with cloud technology, that greatly simplifies data access as well as offers on-demand computing power and storage capacity.

With ATTOM DaaS, access is granted immediately, securely and directly in the cloud. In the ATTOM DaaS solution, data from ATTOM’s data warehouse becomes your own private warehouse and provides you with a fully managed SQL Server database hosted in the cloud. With numerous authentication and audit options to secure and monitor your data as well as a direct and private database for each customer, you can be sure your data is protected. Azure SQL Database meets stringent compliance standards, such as GDPR, ISO/IEC 27001/27002, FedRAMP/FISMA, SOC, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.

Does your role mandate that you keep in touch about how ATTOM’s products are evolving?

Yes, my role specifically is chartered with keeping ATTOM at the forefront of innovation in the data solutions space and providing our customers with data to fuel their business on platforms that are flexible and worry-free so the customer focuses on their business not data or infrastructure management.

Where do you see AI/Machine learning and other smart technologies heading beyond 2025?

We think of it around the data it could generate or enable, so we are keeping an eye on home sensors, image classification, data extraction, data matching and de-duping.

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What start-ups are you keenly following?

We are following Cape Analytics, Vexcel Imaging, Reonomy, and other similar companies. Squarely in the real estate space, restb.ai is doing interesting things.

Tag the one person in the industry whose answers to these questions you would love to read.

I would be interested in reading the answers to these questions from the CEO of Snowflake.

Thank you, Richard! That was fun and hope to see you back on AiThority soon.