ATTOM

ATTOM is a property data company headquartered in Irvine, California. Founded in 1996 as RealtyTrac, it built its name on foreclosure information before transforming itself into an enterprise data-licensing business whose property database covers more than 155 million United States properties and, by its own description, more than 99 percent of the U.S. population. Now known simply as ATTOM — formerly ATTOM Data Solutions — the company licenses parcel, deed, mortgage, foreclosure and hazard data to businesses in real estate, mortgage lending, insurance, marketing and government, and it publishes regular housing-market research that news organizations across the country cite.

Origins as RealtyTrac

The company began in 1996 as RealtyTrac, an online service built around foreclosure listings. At a time when foreclosure information was largely an insider's market gathered from courthouse records, RealtyTrac made properties in all three stages of foreclosure — pre-foreclosure, auction and bank-owned — searchable by the public, real estate agents and investors. That consumer marketplace identity defined the company through the housing boom and the foreclosure crisis that followed, when its foreclosure statistics became a standard reference in national news coverage of the housing collapse. Its websites later included Homefacts, a source of property and neighbourhood data such as school ratings, crime rates and environmental risks, and HomeDisclosure.

Ownership Changes and Transformation

In November 2011, RealtyTrac was acquired by Renovo Capital, through its Renwood Opportunities Fund, together with Rosewood Private Investments. Under that ownership the business was deliberately repositioned: with real estate data executives, the new owners expanded its owned data assets, automated data collection, built a data warehouse and developed a business-to-business sales function, converting a consumer e-commerce platform into an enterprise data provider. In January 2019, Renovo and Rosewood sold ATTOM to Lovell Minnick Partners, a private equity firm specializing in financial and business services. Chief executive Rob Barber, who led the company through this period, framed the mission as expanding a seamless end-to-end data platform for enterprise customers.

The 2016 Rebrand to ATTOM

In July 2016 the company unveiled the ATTOM Data Warehouse and created ATTOM Data Solutions as the parent brand curating it. The warehouse standardized data for more than 150 million U.S. property parcels — at launch described as more than nine terabytes containing billions of rows and thousands of discrete attributes, each property mapped to a unique ATTOM ID. The rebrand signalled that the company's centre of gravity had moved from the RealtyTrac consumer website to the underlying data itself. RealtyTrac remained part of the company's history and consumer operations until July 2022, when ATTOM sold the RealtyTrac and Homefacts websites to Nations Info, which simultaneously became an ATTOM data-licensing customer under a multi-year agreement.

Data Products and Services

ATTOM's core product is licensed property data delivered in bulk, through application programming interfaces and via cloud platforms. The data includes current and historical tax assessor records, deeds, mortgages, foreclosure filings, environmental and natural hazard information, health hazards, neighbourhood characteristics and other property attributes for residential and commercial properties. Around that core, the company offers analytics and valuation-related products for use cases such as risk assessment, marketing, portfolio monitoring and property research. In August 2022 it acquired Estated, a property-data company founded in 2017, adding to its API-driven offerings. The divestiture of its consumer websites the same year left ATTOM focused, in its chief executive's words, entirely on accelerating its data-licensing business.

Research Reports and News Value

Beyond licensing, ATTOM operates as a housing-research publisher. It issues recurring reports built from its database, including foreclosure activity reports, home sales and price analyses, home flipping and equity research, and studies of natural hazard risk and housing affordability. Because the underlying records are nationwide and updated continuously, these releases give journalists timely, quantified measures of housing stress and market turning points — a foreclosure filing trend, for instance, is routinely reported from ATTOM data by national and local outlets alike. In that sense ATTOM functions as a specialist wire for property-market statistics, with its analysts and reports supplying figures that other data providers, which sample rather than enumerate properties, cannot easily match.

Clients and Industries Served

ATTOM sells to enterprises rather than primarily to consumers. Its customers span real estate brokerages and portals, mortgage lenders and servicers, insurance companies assessing property risk, marketing firms building targeted campaigns, government agencies, and technology platforms embedding property data into their own applications. The company describes its data as mission-critical for clients making decisions with historic, rich and near-real-time information. The shift from its RealtyTrac origins is visible in that client list: where the original website served individual investors hunting foreclosure bargains, today's ATTOM serves institutions for whom property data is an input to underwriting, valuation, compliance and customer acquisition.

Geographic Scope

The company's scope is national within the United States. Its database covers more than 155 million residential and commercial properties across the country, with assessor, deed and mortgage coverage mapped county by county and described as reaching more than 99 percent of the U.S. population. That breadth is built from public records gathered from thousands of local jurisdictions, standardized into a single warehouse — the central technical achievement of the business. From its headquarters in Irvine, in Orange County, California, ATTOM supplies that nationwide dataset to clients whose own operations may be local, regional or national, and its published research compares markets at national, state, metropolitan and county levels.

Digital Presence

ATTOM's digital home is attomdata.com, where it documents its data products, APIs and cloud delivery options, publishes its research reports and market analyses, and provides resources for developers and data customers. The company's research circulates further through press releases distributed on national wires and through the real estate trade press, which covers its acquisitions, product launches and data releases. Although the consumer-facing RealtyTrac brand that first made the company famous now belongs to another owner, ATTOM's own name has become the one attached to the underlying data — a reversal that mirrors the company's evolution from website operator to wholesale data supplier.

Significance

ATTOM's history captures a broader story about the digitization of American property records. Founded in 1996 as RealtyTrac, it first demonstrated consumer demand for foreclosure data, survived the housing crisis that made that data famous, and then — through changes of private-equity ownership in 2011 and 2019, a corporate rebrand in 2016 and the sale of its consumer websites in 2022 — rebuilt itself as infrastructure: a standardized, licensed database of more than 155 million properties used by lenders, insurers, portals and governments. Its research reports remain a fixture of housing journalism, and its trajectory explains why a company many consumers no longer see directly nonetheless shapes a great deal of what the real estate industry knows.

Data Standards and Coverage

ATTOM's work depends on turning inconsistent local records into a consistent national dataset. Counties record deeds, mortgages, tax assessments and foreclosure actions in different formats and on different schedules, so the company standardises those records, maps each property to a unique ATTOM ID and links current and historical information to that parcel. Its published descriptions have cited thousands of discrete attributes per property, covering ownership, valuation-related characteristics, hazards and neighbourhood context. For clients, that standardisation is the product: a lender, insurer or platform can query one structure instead of reconciling thousands of county sources. For journalists using ATTOM research, the same process is what allows a national foreclosure or housing report to compare counties and metropolitan areas on a like-for-like basis.