At the peak of the housing crash, RealtyTrac’s monthly foreclosure report became a staple of national newscasts, broadcasting the scope of defaulting homeowners. Now, with foreclosures all but extinct, the Irvine, Calif.-based firm is rebranding itself as a go-to source for market data on virtually every real estate parcel in America, the company announced.
Attom Data Solutions is the new name for the RealtyTrac parent company.
“We’ve rebranded the company to make it as clear as we can we’re not just a foreclosure data business anymore,” Chief Executive Rob Barber told The Orange County Register. “We’re not abandoning the RealtyTrac brand, the RealtyTrac website or the RealtyTrac product at all. ... But behind RealtyTrac is a new brand.”
RealtyTrac is the latest in a series of rebrandings by foreclosure data and service firms that became popular during a crisis that saw 6.3 million U.S. homes foreclosed. ForeclosureRadar renamed itself PropertyRadar in May 2013. And in January, Auction.com rebranded itself as TenX in a bid to expand home auctions to non-distressed properties.
The change comes four years after Attom Data Solutions acquired another website, Homefacts, and its database. And it comes two years after RealtyTrac was licensed to get CoreLogic tax, deed and mortgage data under a Federal Trade Commission settlement allowing CoreLogic to buy competitor DataQuick.
The company said it spent six months overhauling its “data warehouse” to create a single source of information on 150 million U.S. parcels, covering 99 percent of the population.
“Since its 2014 expansion, it’s moved beyond selling to consumers and now seeks a range of business clients,” Barber said. “Among them are real estate search portals for multiple listing services and real estate brokerages, big data firms, marketing firms and universities.”
Data include property taxes, deeds, mortgages, school rankings, sex offenders, environmental risks, natural hazards and other neighborhood characteristics – all mapped to a unique identity number for each property.