Data cleansing builds an accurate foundation of addresses for this proptech company

Most Americans still view owning a home as part of the American Dream, but real estate has gotten more complicated and more competitive over the years. Kukun is on a long-term mission to aggregate the hardest to find data, define breakthrough analytics, and provide products that help everyone grow wealth in life’s game of real estate and home ownership.

One obstacle in the way of that mission’s success?

Messy address data.

Because Kukun gathers data from a variety of sources, matching addresses can be a huge issue due to address errors, missing information and formatting inconsistencies depending on the source.

These sources include:

• Government records like deeds or assessor records—which are typically provided by the county. With over 3,000 counties in the United States using their own address formatting styles, that’s a lot of data to cleanse, but it doesn't stop there.
• Building permits—these are typically city level or county permits, adding tens of thousands sources to the pile of data.
• MLS/Real estate listings and other sources that are aggregated by Kukun.

Homeowners come to mykukun.com and type in their address in a search box. Initially, Kukun was looking for an address verification vendor simply to normalize and standardize these user inputted addresses so they could be matched to existing ones in their database.

While this need drove the initial implementation of Smarty’s US Address Verification tool, Kukun quickly saw the potential to make an even greater impact using the address verification service to standardize all addresses from all the data sources mentioned earlier.

Now Kukun uses Smarty to blend all their data sets by the address field. Their ultimate goal is to have every home in the United States in their database. That’s a lot of addresses to verify, but Smarty has been easy to work with and implement for Kukun.

Nichols noted that when he was researching address verification providers, he was attracted to the helpful articles and educational resources available on Smarty’s website.

"The product appeared to be the most straightforward compared to others we looked at," said Nichols. "It’s a very developer-friendly product. The APIs are clean and fast. They provide what we need."