What is Data Aggregation?
RE Technology president, Marilyn Wilson hosted, “Reliable Data Aggregation and Distribution: It’s not Rocket Science, It’s Harder!” Along with industry experts, our CEO Joel MacIntosh joined this webinar to discuss what data aggregation is, how it works, and why WolfNet is the data aggregation solution.
Over the next couple weeks, we will be posting blogs on those three questions.
“I consider WolfNet a trusted and innovative partner.” – Jim Harrison, CEO of MLSListings
What is Data Aggregation?
Data Aggregation is the process of taking numerous data points and standardizing the information in a uniform format. In real estate, this is a common problem when attempting to work with data from different markets. For example, one market may list bedrooms as “beds” and another market may list bedrooms as “bedrooms”. It may seem like a simple solution to correct the “beds” field to “bedrooms,” however this becomes a very time consuming and complex task when you consider the amount of data and number of fields requiring changes when working with tens or hundreds of markets.
Why is Data Aggregation Important?
Data aggregation is important because companies want to focus on getting products to market quickly and continue developing them and making updates. They don’t want to focus their time on data management. We help by standardizing data from more than 640 markets and make it available for approved companies, as well as helping with gaining access/permission to the data, contract processing, and so on.
Tech vendors and companies are looking for an easy button for data access. However, obtaining this information is a lot harder than expected. There are no resources in the market that answer simple questions like:
- What data is available?
- How do you comply with rules and regulations?
- What contracts need to be reviewed and signed?
- How much does it cost?
- How long does it take?
Not only are there no resources, none of these questions have easy answers. Some people my try to dig and find this information but that approach is inefficient and creates more costs. WolfNet can find the data by using data aggregation.
What is the Data Aggregation Infrastructure?
When you originate the data like WolfNet does, it is definitely more complex than being the recipient of a standardized fee. To be successful with data aggregation, you need to have the infrastructure; and WolfNet does.
- Staff (database, sys admin, developers, project management, tech support, customer service, administrators)
- Hardware/Cloud (data and photo servers for loading, transforming, processing, and hosting data and images)
- Bandwidth (250-400 terabytes/month)
- Data Storage (40 terabytes SAN, CEPH)
- Content Delivery Network for photo distribution via URL
- Data transformation scripts to get the data into a single format
- Sophisticated Data Monitoring and Data Validation Systems (Data is what we expect and is correct)
- Maintenance: There are a lot of unexpected changes daily.
WolfNet has spent $5-$10 million building this data aggregation infrastructure over seven years. Not every company can have this complex of infrastructure and manage it as well as WolfNet does.
Check out the webinar below to hear Joel speak in more detail about what data aggregation is. If you would like to learn more about WolfNet’s data aggregation and distribution services, click here, or call 1-866-WOLFNET.