Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ten-X VP of Data Products, Sheridan Hitchens (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in data usage in the real estate market?

Sheridan Hitchens: It’s interesting. There’re a couple of things that stand out for me. People are increasingly aware that having good data is instrumental. For many people in many companies, buying a piece of real estate is a really big deal. It’s not like buying a $15 CD or a book. You’re typically spending hundreds of thousands on a specific asset.

You want to be as sure as you can that you’re pricing correctly. You want to make sure that you have all the information about the property and neighborhood. There’s an increasing realization that making sure that we get the right data to the right parties, whether they be agents, financers, buyers or sellers, is a big deal.

Sramana Mitra: What has changed? There is a lot of technology available right now. Give me a use case of something that you can do today based on these changes that you couldn’t do in prior times because there wasn’t enough data or technology.

Sheridan Hitchens: Let me give you a specific example and an internal use case. Historically, real estate documents have been paper-based. At best, they’re in PDFs and in somewhat weird formats. Lots and lots of data was processed by hand with all of the resulting implications. We’ve invested quite a lot in our ability to machine read documents, to interpret and extract photos, to tag data, and bring that into our system. If you look back a few years ago, the intelligence and processing power wasn’t there to be able to do those sorts of things.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see open problems? Given what’s happening in Big Data, where would you go?

Sheridan Hitchens: There’re a couple of things over here. We’re comfortable with our product right now and what we have going forward. The real estate market is worth trillions and trillions of dollars. There’s no end of opportunities. There’re lots of opportunities to help provide good sets of data to people. I’m speaking myopically here. We spend a lot of time ingesting and processing data. For us, the easier our job is, the easier it is for us to run machine learning models.

Sramana Mitra: I’m not sure if I got that. How would you frame this company?

Sheridan Hitchens: We have to go through lots and lots of different data providers for lots of different sources. It would be easier for there to be common standards, common data structures, and common ways of aggregating data.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have anything else that you want to add to your perspective on the subject?

Sheridan Hitchens: I spend a lot of time in conferences in the data space. I have some more broad perspective on where I think Big Data is moving and what’s going to be important going forward.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Ten-X VP of Data Products, Sheridan Hitchens
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