Trade Me and e-Spatial: working together to provide New Zealander’s with better property insights

With the launch of Trade Me’s new Property Insights website, New Zealander’s are now empowered to make better property decisions. Launched in October 2016, the website allows Kiwis to search property information for over 1.5m residential properties across New Zealand, including historical sales data, likely sales estimates, property details and current rating valuations, for free.

Trade Me’s Head of Property, Nigel Jeffries, says “Trade Me believes that providing New Zealanders with transparent, easy, and open access to property data offers huge benefits. People can search for any residential address nationwide, even if it is not for sale, and receive a free estimate of what we think a property is likely to sell for.”

With ever-changing property and sales information, the accuracy of the data is crucial. e-Spatial the independent spatial consultancy firm, worked with Trade Me to set up and maintain the property database and processes that support Property Insights. To ensure better address data, Trade Me have adopted Land Information New Zealand’s (LINZ’s) national standards for addressing. e-Spatial based the database design around the principles of LINZ’s new Address Information Management System (AIMS) and Property Data Management Framework (PDMF).

e-Spatial’s Managing Director, Simon Jellie says “Trade Me have been very forward thinking by adopting LINZ’s new address and property frameworks for Property Insights. This approach supports the multi-unit and mixed use property types, such as apartments and retirement villages, which are becoming more prevalent. It will enable a wide range of value-added services for Trade Me users.

 “A key lesson learned from the Canterbury Earthquake response was that a property address and its associated information are managed separately and are not as well connected as most people assumed. It’s an ‘under the covers’ type of problem that results in operational issues and unnecessary costs. Implementing the new models lets us get this right once and for all.”

Trade Me have developed algorithms that use property data including the rateable value, sales data, and sales of similar properties to determine a low, medium and high value estimate of a property’s sales price.  The Property Insights website relies on keeping the data current. 

Regular inputs of Council property, valuation and sales data are connected to address and title data from LINZ via automated processes. For e-Spatial’s data consultants the process is all about data quality and continual improvement to underpin the growing demand for property-related information.

Trade Me see this as just the beginning for Property Insights. A strong platform has been created, onto which further data sources can be added in the future.

ENDS

About e-Spatial

Established in 1998, e-Spatial has grown to become New Zealand’s leading independent spatial consulting firm. They partner with enterprise and government agencies to maximise the benefit of spatial to their business. They link location knowledge and business intelligence to help organisations make better decisions and better serve their customers.

e-Spatial has experience in providing high-level future strategy for clients, to guide their decisions and keep them informed of new technology directions. They ensure that any strategies developed take into account new technology and new directions in the industry to ensure that future directions are innovative, effective, flexible and future-proofed.

For more information, see: http://www.e-spatial.co.nz/