BuildFax Teams With Equifax to Deliver Unique Property History Intelligence Assets to Insurance Sector
Data on 70+ Million Properties Nationally Provides Carriers With Unmatched Insight into Effective Pricing Strategies, Reduced Fraud and Increased Profitability
Austin, TX – June 7, 2011 – (RealEstateRama) — BuildFax, the industry’s exclusive creator of the largest commercial and residential permitting database in the United States, today announced that it has joined forces with Equifax Inc. (NYSE:EFX) to give property & casualty insurance carriers a more complete view of underwriting risks while uncovering any key changes to their portfolio since policy inception. Now, Equifax customers can gain immediate access to BuildFax’s unique, differentiated data assets, which include property history information representing 60 percent of the nation’s building permit volume. Through this relationship, insurance carriers can improve the accuracy of underwriting valuation models to develop more effective pricing strategies and reduce the potential for fraud.
What is in This One-of-a-Kind Data Set?
BuildFax aggregates, analyzes, delivers and maintains the industry’s first and only data set that provides transparency into a property’s hidden details. The company’s products offer quick and easy access to intelligence on vital property improvements and valuation increases, which would be unknown or unrecognized by any other current available means. This intelligence also includes key risk factors such as aging roofs and other major system indicators. Insurance carriers that adopt Equifax information solutions can now easily access BuildFax’s wealth of data on property improvements and valuations –giving them the insight they need to qualify a property for more aggressive insurance rates or customer loyalty discounts.
“While the economic downturn and increased regulatory requirements have pressured the P&C market, the industry is now showing signs of stabilization and even momentum,” said David Flam, senior vice president, Equifax US Information Solutions. “Innovative resources like BuildFax’s property history intelligence, on tens of millions of properties across the country, are contributing to improved performance.”
Why Insurance Carriers Are Utilizing This Data
Insurance carriers that leverage this data gain access to unique property history intelligence delivered quickly and accessible through a single source. BuildFax’s product eliminates the need to sift through volumes of disparate court data, which can often result in inaccuracies during the data collection and analysis process. Now, insurance carriers can leverage the benefits of this unique data to more accurately price home insurance for both new business opportunities and renewals.
The BuildFax Advantage in Action
The strength of BuildFax property history intelligence and technology was underscored during a recent engagement involving an Equifax customer. After evaluating BuildFax permitting data, an insurance carrier uncovered substantial valuation changes to their book of business post-policy inception. A key advantage, the BuildFax system leverages secure cloud technology to enable seamless access to its unique data assets. With this insight, insurance carriers can easily incorporate building permit data into their business decisions and more accurately identify over-valuations, under-valuations and everything in-between.
“We focus on documenting and updating a structure’s ‘life story’ by collecting and providing detailed information for all U.S. residential and commercial property related decisions,” Holly Tachovsky, President of BuildFax added. “We’re very pleased to be joining forces with a recognized industry leader like Equifax, as this relationship will allow us to quickly introduce our unique dataset to the insurance industry. Equifax is known for bringing powerful intelligence to this vertical and we are confident that our offering will strengthen its service and provide a level of transparency to building permit data not yet seen in the industry.”
About Equifax (www.equifax.com):
Equifax empowers businesses and consumers with information they can trust. A global leader in information solutions, we leverage one of the largest sources of consumer and commercial data, along with advanced analytics and proprietary technology, to create customized insights that enrich both the performance of businesses and the lives of consumers.
With a strong heritage of innovation and leadership, Equifax continuously delivers innovative solutions with the highest integrity and reliability. Businesses – large and small – rely on us for consumer and business credit intelligence, portfolio management, fraud detection, decisioning technology, marketing tools, and much more. We empower individual consumers to manage their personal information, protect their identity, and maximize their financial well-being.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Equifax Inc. operates in the U.S. and 15 other countries throughout North America, Latin America and Europe. Equifax is a member of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500® Index. Our common stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol EFX.
About BuildFax (www.buildfax.com):
BuildFax, a division of BUILDERadius, is the creator of the first and only national database of historical building permit data. Co-headquartered in Austin, Texas and Asheville, North Carolina, BuildFax has created a proprietary property intelligence engine that contains building and permitting information from 4,000+ cities and counties throughout the country. To date companies in the insurance, financial services, inspection, and appraisal industry as well as buyers and sellers of property are actively using BuildFax data in their assessment and decision-making. As the best and only source of a structure’s “life story,” the BuildFax database continues to grow, currently covering over 60 percent of the U.S. commercial and residential building stock with 6 billion data points.
