Today, First American Spatial Solutions (FASS) launched a cadastral geospatial data service called ParcelPoint, with more than 120 million property parcels across the United States. The company delivers the polygons, address, centroid and parcel number for each parcel in 2,000 counties.
To create this data First American harnessed the PxPoint address geocoding and spatial engine that they acquired when they purchased Proxix Solutions in October 2007. The resulting platform of technology and data feeds First American’s own internal needs for their tax, title and insurance services, and is now being sold as a service for companies in need of highly accurate property data.
Over the past two years FASS has spent multiple millions of dollars to build this database, according to Scott Little, vice president and general manager, and that figure doesn’t take into account the 35 million parcels that were created in previous years , and any of the quality control expense. The effort encompassed thousands of trips to county and township records offices, an effort that is already part of the workflow of the First American title business. The regular and ongoing maintenance of this data is a key component, as in-person visits to records offices are still a necessary step in many jurisdictions as the data is still not captured in a digital format uniformly across the country.
Prior to the FASS effort to digitize this data, the company was looking at parcel information, but it wasn’t in a GIS format or part of a digital workflow. In an effort to update their flood insurance product, they started by adding aerial photography, and then parcel information. Over time they connected the parcel boundary, the assessor parcel record number, and the address for flood determination.
First American has an online automated flood determination tool that utilizes this data, and early on they calculated that a one percent increase in the automated hit rate was worth $400,000 to their business, and that savings doesn’t go into the labor cost of doing a manual lookup to determine the flood risk. With the system in place, their flood business has saved significant money and time in the process, and that’s just one First American business unit.
ParcelPoint is a business solutions that doesn’t aim to be part of a consumer-oriented real estate application such as Zillow. It’s aimed at high-end clients where the ROI of having accurate parcel information is easy to justify — with the potential for to save millions for businesses in many different sectors. The data is used by energy companies for risk and compliance studies where they need to know the proximity of pipelines to property boundaries. It’s also being used in the energy sector to understand subsurface ownership of resources, and wind farm prospecting to know who owns the parcels of interest. The service is also important for disaster recovery, with insurance companies using the data in combination with imagery and other data to understand damage.
Another of First American’s internal customers is their loan performance division that provides mortgage loan information to capital markets on Wall Street. They can now provide analytics at the parcel level, as opposed to a Zip Code level previously.
With the current economic meltdown largely fueled by failed mortgages, there has been a growing call for a national cadastre as an early warning system to foreshadow lending failures. A national cadastre has promoted previously, with the National Research Council authoring a report titled, “Need for a Multipurpose Cadastre” back in 1980. But, there was never funding for such an effort previously. Now with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act there has been talk to use some of the money to get it done.
It’s hard to think of the federal government doing better than First American in their efforts to collect and maintain this data, and the company already has a more than two-year jump on the effort. First American has been active in Washington for some time in order to make lawmakers and policymakers aware of their effort, and they feel comfortable that any effort to build a national cadastre would be a public/private partnership. With a focus both on regularly updated data delivered with a web services platform, FASS is well poised to deliver custom solutions to businesses and government entities alike.
