If your business is focused on property lending in Canada you have a few basic needs. You need to ingest and understand property address data that comes from buyers, sellers, lenders and other institutions. This means that you receive address data, geocode the addresses, and then build out a complete picture of the property. You can then make decisions — decisions related to pricing, risk and your involvement (or not) in the transaction.
Any process that starts with an address is challenging. There are different ways to phrase an address. If you are casually communicating an address, you can get away with a certain degree of inaccuracy—if you write “Etobicoke” instead of “Toronto” or “Rue Sainte-Catherine” instead of “Rue Saint-Catherine,” the odds are good that your letter will still reach the intended recipient. However, if your business is property-based lending, you need a sophisticated solution that eliminates the discrepancies that can have huge financial and legal repercussions.
How does LightBox Canada help you with processes that start with addresses? LightBox has a 3 component solution that eliminates the uncertainty around address processing, providing a solution that ensures fast, low-cost processes.
Locate your customer
The first component that LightBox provides is geocoding technology which uses the most complete universe of Canadian location data, linked to Canada Post information, where every address is located with the highest accuracy possible. LightBox Canada geocoding ensures that the imperfect address data that you receive – incomplete addresses, incorrect postcodes, alias city names and more – can be understood, cleaned and matched to the real location on the ground.
Persist your data
When LightBox matches your address information we supply the LightBox Unique Address Identifier (UAID) back to you; you can use this unique ID for any subsequent lookups. Once a LightBox UAID is assigned to an address it never changes. The only system of its kind in Canada, LightBox’s UAID is the product of sophisticated data aggregation and the data is continuously managed to ensure that users are always working with the most accurate data possible. Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of addresses are added, deleted and changed each year and UAID is a system that lets you understand and react to that change.
Enrich your insight
You likely want to know more about a property than just its location. This is known as “enrichment”, finding out any additional information or insight from new sources of data. Any geocoded location of a property can be enriched with additional data after the address has been standardized, matched and located. Use the geocoded location’s UAID, address, spatial location or postcode to look up any additional enrichment insight that you need. This enrichment could come from LightBox, open data or 3rd party sources of information.
What is the benefit to you and your organization?
High accuracy geocoding lets you confidently locate your customers. This confidence extends to geocoding with imperfect address data, given the many ways that an address can be incorrectly formed or represented.
The UAID exists to eliminate the uncertainty that characterizes activities within property-based lending. Avoid miscommunication and uncertainty associated with low quality address solutions. Companies using the UAID can be certain that they are working with the most accurate address data available and the best way to represent addresses over time.
Enriching the data that you receive from a customer provides several benefits – it allows verification of information your customer provides AND it provides new insight. Is the business used for residential or business purposes? Is the property in a flood zone or close to a coastline? What other properties are nearby and do any represent risk?
Summed up, these LightBox capabilities provides your organization with reliable decision making at low cost. If you are a lender, a mortgage insurer, registry or any other party involved in the property-based lending ecosystem you can implement LightBox data solutions that will decrease your implementation and operational costs while increasing the speed of reaching reliable decisions. Contact us today to learn more about our Canadian spatial and address solutions for lenders.
