SMR Research

Property Data:
Challenges and Solutions

by Stuart Feldstein
April 2021

Doing business in the real estate market of today – whether you are working with commercial or residential properties, underwriting loans or insurance policies – creates a unique set of challenges. The data available from SMR Research enables you to meet these challenges and maximize your profits and competitive edge.

Challenge: Small business insurance policies are thin-margin.

They absorb too much underwriting time. They require too many questions and answers. And we sometimes get inaccurate data, causing mispriced premiums.

Solution: Pre-fill.

SMR’s insurance underwriting clients use our data to create pre-filled profiles of virtually all U.S. properties and all U.S. companies.

When an agent brings a policy request, our clients can furnish a near-instant answer. Costs drop. Agents get paid faster and come back again.

Underwriting data are more accurate, so premium pricing is sharper. Example: We have the official local tax assessor dates for a building’s age. Agents and building owners may not know the age for certain.

You can get property and company data for the nation, for any state, any zip code, or by type of business.

Challenge: How can we do better disaster loss estimates and reinsurance planning? We need to know more about potential costs.

Solution: We have all the properties in dangerous locations.

Several government and private sources identify locales most subject to flooding, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and severe storms.

What they don’t tell you is how many homes and businesses are located in those same areas – by state, county, zip, zip+4, or even by individual street address.

And, they don’t tell you the values of those properties. We have tax assessor improvement values and building square footage, which should help in aggregating estimated replacement costs.

If you have all our data, you can analyze any place, any time. Or, we can supply data just in specific areas you need.

Challenge: Before making small business loans, my bank needs to ensure there are no “surprise” problems. Who’s out there doing the research?

Solution: We are. The answers are in SMR’s Commercial Risks file.

We maintain a database of some 10 million companies that have one or more potential problems – the kind that are difficult to know without specialized research.

We check for regulatory problems with the EPA, OSHA, and the Department of Labor.

We track accidents that companies have had with DOT-registered trucks.

We typically know if the company is located in a very old building – or a property in a FEMA flood zone. We know if the address is known to be contaminated.

Our file tracks properties with underground fuel storage tanks, and companies with liquor licenses or permits to sell guns. We know which firms transport hazardous waste.

We uniquely measure the local crime rate against U.S. norms over 3 recent years.