

The current online tools for valuing real estate are ripe for disruption, says one Canadian company in the space.
David King, CEO of Calgary-based Zaio (Zaio Stock Quote, Chart, News: TSXV:ZAO) was in Toronto today to present at the StableView Asset Management Tech14 Conference.
King says the $6-billion that is spent on real estate valuations isn’t being served by free services such as Zillow.
Instead, the market might soon be looking at Zaio’s comprehensive solution. Zaio database is culled from public record data Database in 3700 counties in the United States and has 90 million homes and 30 billion data points.
King says Zaio’s decade long commitment to big data trumps the current low tech solutions available.
“The problems with services like Zillow is they just don’t work,” says King. “As humans we know that there is a good side of the street and a bad side, but computer models don’t.
Zillow is an online real estate database that was founded in 2005. The website draws more than 86-million unique visitors each month.
Zaio clients are banks, investors and appraisers such as Black Rock, US Bank, Fannie Mae and Quicken. The Company sells appraisal forms at prices ranging from $30 to $800, and processes about 650 pro forma reports everyday.
Another more modern aspect of Zaio’s solution is its timeliness, says King. The company’s database updates every week, but King he thinks it could soon be updating on an hourly basis. The speed is not at the expense of accuracy however. The Zaio CEO points to a recent trial with Fannie Mae which revealed that its data was accurate to plus or minus 1.5%, a full percentage point better than its competition.
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