First American Takes on the National Cadastre and Risk Management (#ESRIUC)

I had some questions about a few announcements from First American Spatial Solutions on ParcelPoint, its national cadastral database and its new product offering, Risk Analysis Solution for ArcGIS with ESRI, so I was lucky to sit down with Scott Little, Executive VP during the conference.

First American is in a unique position because unlike some data providers, it has a number of built in customers - other parts of the company that manage titles and title insurance and the like. That’s what really enabled the company to built out its national cadastral product, ParcelPoint. Little explained that it covers about 120M of the 145 million parcels in the U.S. That covers about 86% of the parcels and 90% of the population. The big deal about this data set? It’s not just the parcel data, but the parcel data tied to a an address and a PIN. That in turn can be tied into other FASS datasets. Now outside of those built in customers, who else would be interested in such a dataset? Basically any organization that deals with anything that impacts parcels across multiple jurisdictions - across town, county, state boundaries. Consider things like pipelines, utilities or hurricanes. They impact such areas and in time, the owners of those properties need to be contacted. Further, the data is normalized so, for say a notification of a pipeline inspection, all those who own property it crosses could be dealt with in one swoop. Without such a dataset that might mean dealign with one, two or perhaps 10 or 20 datasets in various forms.

Since there’s really not been a dataset of this kind with this sort of coverage, the applications for it are really not fully known, Little suggests. He did tease that it’s likely the dataset will be available via a Web service in time, which makes sense. I also asked about how FASS’ parcel dataset will compare to the database the U.S. Census Bureau is putting together for the upcoming count. First off, he was quick to note that the Census dataset will be just points and will be stripped down for privacy reasons to hold limited data. He does feel sure it will be available to the public in time, but exactly how useful it will be is unclear.

My final question i had was about who should hold such a dataset: a private company like FASS or the federal government. Little was quick to state the federal government should have it and noted that FASS is very open to a public private partnership to enable that.

FASS new offering for insurance companies, Risk Analysis Solution for ArcGIS, unites the company’s data layers (parcels, risk layers, actuarial data) and ESRI’s software to analyze that data. Insurers can use it examine the risk on specific properties as well as to examine a portfolio of clients to see if its risk needs to be better balanced. Response, Little notes, has been quite positive, as FASS and ESRI jointly market it to both their client bases.

First American has, in the past few years, added its name to the list of commercial data providers geospatial professionals needs to keep in mind now and into the future.