I would like to compare some data services with each other! Is anyone up for it? Let’s enter the same primary filters into our data service and see how many matching entries are displayed! We currently use Property Radar.
Filter suggestion #1: Alachua County, Florida, Land Type: Land, Not Owner Occupied, Est. Equity 100%
Filter suggestion #2: Douglas County, Colorado, Land Type: Land, Not Owner Occupied, Est. Equity 100%
Result with Property Radar filter #1: 8,075
Result with Property Radar filter #2: 10,349
If you want to take part, name your data service and tell us how many matching entries are displayed for the two filters. I am open to more detailed filter suggestions. Thanks in advance!
BUT, it’s worth pointing out, DataTree’s filters are not an apples-to-apples comparison to PropStream (and I’m not sure about Property Radar).
When I add the 100% equity filter to both lists, the property count went down to 0. It appears this line item isn’t available in DataTree’s database for either county.
DataTree gives you A LOT of different ways to filter vacant land, whereas PropStream gives you one. I’m unsure what assumptions PropStream makes when it says “vacant land” (does that include Commercial? industrial? Agrictultural? Native American property? Unusable properties? etc).
With owner-occupied status, DataTree has this “Unknown” filter, which (I’m told) basically means it’s absentee owned… but I’ve never been sure why DataTree does this. In these instances above, I included those in the list.
@retipsterseth Very interesting; thank you for the explanation. I know that the filter options are sometimes very different and also the data basis. Some data services have better data in certain states/counties than others. I appreciate your help with this little experiment!
Including the 100% equity filter in both counties brings each count down to 54 for Alachua and 4 for Douglas, so I didn’t include that filter in the above screenshots.
BatchLeads also appears to include many houses in their “vacant land” filter (note the houses that show up in the right sidebar results). I have no idea where it’s pulling its data or how its filters work… but it appears to be inconsistent with the other data services. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong, but if so, I’m not sure what.
@niclas-hk I’ve always been curious about the difference between data services, but didn’t want to spend the money trying out all the different ones. Here’s what I see from SiteXPro:
Result with SiteXPro filter #1 (Alachua): 10,351
Result with SiteXPro filter #2 (Douglas): 12,865
SiteXPro’s filters aren’t apples-to-apples either. They seem to be most similar to Datatree. Of note…
I used the general “Vacant Land” Property Type, which includes commercial, residential, industrial, institutional, private preserve, etc. Like Datatree, lots of options on what type of vacant land you want to filter.
SiteXPro has an ownership option to set “Owner Occupied Residential” to “no” (which sounds like it would be the equivalent of Not Owner Occupied in your filters), but doing so drops the list size to 0. It also has an “Absentee Owned” option. I’ve found this filter to be very unreliable though, and generally don’t set it with SiteXPro. My numbers above did NOT have Absentee Owned set. If you DO set Absentee Owned, Alachua goes down to 4,031 and Douglas goes down to 9,135
Like Datatree, setting 100% equity dropped both counties down to 0
@lindah Thank you for your input. If you like, you could suggest a more general filter or a filter that works better with SiteXPro and we can compare the numbers again.
When I take out the “Absentee Owned” and “Est Equity 100%” in PropertyRadar the numbers are:
Property Radar filter #1 without AO and EE100: 9,838 (8,075 before with the additional filters, not a big change)
Property Radar filter #2 without AO and EE100: 20,548 (10,349 before with the additional filters. a much bigger change, maybe in Colorado there are better data for these additional filters)
@niclas-hk Honestly, I’m not really sure what else to suggest for replacements in SiteXPro. I’ve never taken equity into consideration when I pull my lists, so this was actually the first time I tried using an equity filter in SiteXPro.
As for the “Absentee Owned” filter, I haven’t found an adequate replacement in SiteXPro. I used to set Absentee Owned to True, but always seemed to end up with smaller list sizes than I thought I should. On a whim, I tried not setting it one time, which resulted in a larger list. In looking at the list, I noticed that the values in that column were either blank, In-State, or Out-Of-State. When you set the filter to True, it scrubs out the blank ones. I don’t know if these values come from the county or if SiteXPro uses an algorithm to compare situs address to mailing address and sets them itself. In any case, I found many times that this field was blank (and thus being scrubbed out if the filter is set to True) even when it was actually absentee-owned. So, whether it’s the county not filling in the field or SiteXPro not having a good algorithm for figuring it out, it has not been reliable in the counties I’ve played with.
Thanks in advance!
