PropertyRadar 3.0, our most significant release since 2014, is now live. We’re excited, and we think you will be too.

PropertyRadar 3.0 introduces lots of new data and many new features to help you grow your business.

Highlights, with full details below.

Almost 80% of you asked for phone numbers. You got it. We’re adding over 40 million phone numbers for property owners and their spouses.

And, until September 30th, this feature comes at no additional cost.

On October 1st, those phone numbers will be available to you for a small additional charge. But when you see how the numbers are helping you grow your business, it’ll be a no brainer to keep ‘em coming.

Don’t worry – the cost won’t be much. And, now you won’t have to buy phone numbers from other list providers.

With PropertyRadar 3.0, you can have unlimited, always up-to-date contact information with your subscription.

Phone numbers are huge! But there’s a lot more demographic data we’re adding as well:

We’ve been working on this concept for over two years, incorporating as much feedback from customer surveys and usability tests. Recently, over 80% of customers indicated a preference for tabbed organization over long-scrolls.

Our new Property Profile design features tabbed navigation, and it’s organized so that it’s faster and easier to get to the info you need, without having to scroll through info you don’t. Between all the new data we added, and what we intend to include in the future, there was simply no way a single, long-scroll Property Profile would be efficient or easy.

It looks awesome, and it becomes super intuitive to use in minutes. A customer we previewed it to the other day called it the “Facebook for Properties”. We like it.

The top header of the Property Profile now shows where the property is on a map, and we load up a street view of the property if it exists. Street view pulls the whole, new Property Profile together.

The main Property Profile navigations tabs are: Overview, Details, Contacts, Value, and Neighborhood.

The Overview is just that – a summary of the Property, Contacts, Value, and your Photos. On the right, you can add or remove the property from your Lists, and select your Status.

Next there’s…a big blank space …cool, huh? Actually, something new and exciting goes there that didn’t make it into this release, but will arrive with the next. You’re going to like it…stay tuned!

Under the Details tab, you can find Location, Site, Structure, Property Taxes, Transactions, Foreclosures, Listings, and your Photos, Notes, and Files. You can quickly jump to heading information, by clicking the heading on the left.

Under the Contacts tab is the owner information for that property. And you’re going to love this…you can edit, add, and update that owner’s contact data. Gwendolyn prefers to be called Wendy, and she recently changed her email address…now you can edit the Contacts info as needed.

The Value tab has Summary, Purchase, Market Value, Market Rent data, as well as the Comparables and Investment Analysis tools.

Finally, the Neighborhood tab has improved visualizations, and some added information at the county and state levels. The Neighborhood tab is organized into Demographics, Housing, Housing Risk, Neighbors, and Environment headings.

Note: this new Property Profile will roll out to the mobile apps soon – which means all this data and these features will be available to you in your hand. It’ll be easy to just tap to a tab on your smartphone.

Of all the features introduced in the new Property Profile, the Contacts tab is certain to get the most attention. Getting to know your prospects, and getting in touch with them is where your research turns into action, and action turns into growing your business.

Under the Contacts tab, our aim is to provide the profile pictures, phone numbers, social media links, and mailing addresses for the property owner(s). Will it be spot on all the time? No, but it’s as good as any other list provider, and even better in context. And know that every day, we’re working hard to make our matching algorithms robust. We did it with foreclosure data, now it’s only a matter of time before we change the game with owner contact data.

We’ve made several fields in the Contact tab editable. Change a formal name to a nickname. Delete a bad phone number, or add a new email address. And if you add a new email address, we’ll immediately search and append social profiles associated with that email address, if they exist, to the Contact tab.

By updating the owner’s name, you can personalize your direct mail campaign. Using the name the owner prefers, you can make huge strides in that connection.

Within the Contacts tab, we’re adding a small, heading called Other Properties. We’re continually updating our algorithms, to figure out what other properties an owner may own. It’s not perfect, and we’ve got many more months of tuning algorithms and combing through trusts to match everything up. But it’s super cool as it is now, and is a huge research time saver, so we decided to include the initial design in this release.

This feature won’t reflect properties owned outside the five states we cover. If Carlos owns a condo in Colorado, that will not be shown until we expand to nationwide coverage. And due to a mind-boggling array of public data recording inconsistencies, and the smokescreens of trusts, the data may not always be accurate. Even so, your research time can be reduced significantly.

Oh, and by having all the Other Properties there, it’s an incredible insight into the net worth of the owner. And with phone numbers and all this demographic data, nobody’s going to bother their title rep for an old-school property profile again.

Finally, we’ve made some significant updates to our maps and map tools.

Everywhere we have maps, the interface and the tools are now consistent. Since everyone loves the heatmaps in Explore, we added the Layers heatmaps and Boundaries overlays; as well as consistent Aerial View, Location, and Measure options in every map interface.

But the big news with maps, is that you can now select any property on the map, even if it isn’t in your results, and see an overview of that property. And in many instances, even view its Property Profile.

Some of you may get freaked out that we have so much data on everyone. Maybe even on you. We know, we get it.

But here’s the deal: it’s 2017. All of the big companies already have this data and are using it all day, every day. If this freaks you out, then your option is to get rid of your cell phone and never use Google, Facebook, or Amazon again.

Our mission is to find a way to make the data and tools that previously only big businesses could afford, and level the playing field; making that data and those tools available to small businesses, at an affordable cost. Big businesses are investing millions of dollars into data and in acquiring the most sophisticated tools. Just know that anything you see in PropertyRadar now, has been used by Big Business for years.

We like to think of ourselves as the “Big Data Robin Hood” for small, local businesses. Except for the tights, of course. We’re obtaining the best data and data-marketing strategies used by Big Business, and finding ways to make it available to you.

We’re obsessed with tilting the advantage away from Big Business, and back into your reach…at fraction of the cost. Is Big Business happy we’re doing this? No, but nothing’s stopping them, so who says we can’t provide the data to you?

As always, a major release like this will introduce some bugs that we’ll need to fix. We do our best to test, but with a ‘couple million lines of code’ and billions of data records, we can’t always catch everything.

3.0 Known issues have been resolved with 3.0.2 hotfix on August 4, 2017. Read about it here.

Change is hard for some people, and we get that. But being resistant to adapting to ever-changing market conditions and technology is a recipe for failure…for the both of us.

The Property Profile had to evolve for three reasons:

Q. Holy smokes! All this Demographic Data is scary…why are you providing so much personal information?

Our mission is to give small businesses the same access to all the same data that is widely available and already being used by big businesses. Yeah, it’s a lot. And, yeah, it’s scary. No, no one stole it from you. Yes, it was all legally collected. You likely gave it away in return for entering a survey, or one of your friends ratted you out when they uploaded their contact list in exchange for some free service. Chances are you’ve ratted your friends out too.

About the only way to keep your personal info safe anymore, is to not share it with anyone, even Mom. Get rid of your smartphone. Never use any social media site, like Facebook or LinkedIn. Don’t shop on Amazon. Never click on an ad.

We don’t necessarily like it ourselves, but it is the state of the world we currently live in. And we don’t think it’s fair to let the big guys continue to stomp out small businesses by being the only ones to have access to all this data.

Once you fully realize how much additional data there is about you that large companies are taking advantage of every day, we hope you can see why we’re driven to make small, local businesses competitive.

Q. How good is this demographic data?

You’ll be surprised both how great it is, and by how bad it is. Keep in mind that we’re giving you the ability to view the data that other list providers only allow you to use as criteria.

Companies pretty much source data in the same ways, and from the same sources. We’re confident that what we are providing is on par with the best in the industry. But there’s a big difference with other tools, in that we let you look under the hood and see the actual data used to create your list, rather than just giving you a list.

Powerful, awesome, and honestly, often wrong. Keep in mind, the goal with this feature is not perfect data, it’s to help you better target market your most likely customers.

Again, the big businesses are in the same boat and working with the same data. And yes, we’ll continue to source newer and better data, all the while improving our algorithms.

Q. Will you have email addresses?

We already have hundreds of millions of email addresses, and we use them to bring you stuff like social profiles and profile pictures.

We’re still working on how to let you use email addresses to contact customers in a way that reasonably respects internet etiquette and Federal law.

But yes, our vision is to make it easy for you to contact prospects by email. Stay tuned for information.

Q. Can this demographic data be used in making lists?

Yes. Look under Criteria > Owner > Demographic Data

Q. Can I export demographic data, like phone numbers and social media profiles?

No. From the beginning, our goal has been to get users out of the import/export business. Exported data goes stale the moment you export – whereas we keep it fresh and tasty. More importantly, list sellers charge you per record, and often for each additional item of data you want. We hate this model!

Instead, we give you unlimited access to all the records you can see, and we give you all the tools you need to import those lists. The one trade-off? Contractually, we can’t let you export all the goodness. If you need to buy phone numbers, or other data to import and manage in your enterprise software, we can’t help. If you want an all-in-one solution, where you never have to fix another CSV file in Microsoft™ Excel, we’ve got you covered.

Q. I looked myself up and see my phone number and social media profiles. Will you remove me from PropertyRadar so other users can’t contact me by phone?

Sorry, no. Here’s why:

Our mission is to give small businesses the same marketing opportunities as Big Business - and that means giving them access to the same data. If we have your number or social data, it means that thousands of other marketing companies do as well.

You may think of this as private data, but it truly isn't. The problem is that for it to be of any use, you have to give it to other people. Now if you had them sign a non-disclosure agreement before you gave it to them, you might have some recourse against them. But even if you did, are you really going to sue Mom for unwittingly uploading her address book to a service whom she gave permission to resell “her” data when she didn't read their privacy policy?

Know that we at least aren't exacerbating the problem. Our privacy policy clearly states that we won't resell any of your data - your personal data, or any data you add to our system. We won't even provide it to our other customers. Period. We also don't allow phone or contact data (other than assessor data) to be exported, to make sure our users don't spread it further.

Even if you ended up in a few of the hundreds of thousands of lists created by PropertyRadar users, the likelihood you would receive more than one call or Facebook friend request from another user of PropertyRadar is statistically insignificant. Unless your name is Taylor Swift. You are more apt to get a postcard.

Unfortunately, for better or worse, this is now the world we live in. If you get a call from a number you don’t recognize, don’t answer it. You may be tempted to change your number, but if you give that phone number to anyone, it’s likely going to end up “in the wild” yet again. Once your Mom, spouse, children, or friends add it to their address book it’s only a matter of time before they unwittingly give it to a service that will once again resell it.