Local property records are the authoritative source for square footage information, but what happens when they’re incorrect? 

Companies that use this information to make decisions for property insurance, commercial insurance, small business lending, and KYB/KYC compliance open themselves up to lawsuits and other risks, when they rely on local sources that contain outdated information. 

Do local records accurately reflect a property’s square footage?

There’s no reason to assume that local records are unreliable, but tax assessors generally perform mass appraisals for large numbers of properties over a short period of time. Individual assessments within those appraisals can be inaccurate, and property owners may have their own reasons for being slow to correct official records. 

Ultimately, it’s a question of how much risk a business is willing to assume when it relies on incorrect information about a specific property. The fact that the majority of records are accurate does little to protect against the consequences of records that have errors or missing information.

Improving accuracy and fill-rate in property square footage

There are two methods of improving accuracy and fill-rate in property square footage. The first is by examining data across multiple providers that aggregate tax assessor (county records) information. Certified data providers in the Demyst ecosystem include Attom, Quantarium, Corelogic, and Infutor. An organization can match properties in its portfolio to these providers and select whether it will use a single provider or multiple data providers based on the specific use case.

Additionally, we recommend examining providers in the geospatial data space such as Tensorflight, Arturo, and Betterview, using a combination of artificial intelligence and aerial imagery to calculate attributes such as property square footage, distance to tree, and number of floors, among other attributes. Geospatial providers are particularly useful in insurance claims processes because their data may be more recent than tax assessor information.

Demyst Makes it Simple

By working with a partner that specializes in external data, enterprises manage the costs of data optimization and adapt to ongoing change in an evolving data landscape.

Instead of focusing on a single upstream data source, Demyst maximizes flexibility and efficiency through a catalog of external data providers accessed through a single API. Pre-made recipes address a large number of use cases, including finding the exact square footage of a property.

Create your free account on the Demyst platform and discover more recipes that can streamline your business processes.