As the housing market continues to improve, it is essential for real estate businesses to ensure that consumer information is safe and secure. According to the Nationwide’s Health of Housing Markets (HoHM) Report, “the national LIHHM (leading index of healthy housing markets) remains at a level well over the break-even of 100, although it has fallen a tad recently, suggesting that the U.S. housing market is healthy with little chance of a national housing downturn over the next year.” This data conveys that consumers may continue on the same purchasing trend.
An interesting aspect of the real estate industry is the amount of people that are involved in the process. As an example, in retail, a customer uses their form of payment to purchase an item and then after approval, gets to have the product immediately. However, in real estate there are three parties involved, the seller, buyer and the real estate business. It extremely crucial for businesses to ensure that all parties involved and their information is safeguarded, to keep their reputation strong.
EVS offers a suite of products for businesses to protect themselves and its consumers from fraudsters. In the real estate industry, EVS products can help businesses verify information in processing transactions, locating properties, ensuring compliance, protecting against fraud and more.
Some EVS tools that can assist real estate businesses include id verification, individual fraud scoring, residence verification and history, mixed use property verification and more. ID verification matches several data points to the person unique to the person being verified. Individual fraud scoring generates data conflicts through the IdentiFraud Consumer+ solution. EVS’ residence verification and history verifies a person’s current and previous addresses, while the mixed use property confirms whether a property is residential, commercial or both.
Buying a house can be a significant part of a person’s life and is a high cost purchase. Therefore, it is important for businesses to secure consumer information and do everything in their power to prevent fraudsters from doing harm to companies and its customers.
