When considering a platform to enhance your rent optimizations, the choice between ApartmentIQ and ILS Data Providers carries significant weight. The data you acquire will drive every decision and influence teams and partners across the business.
But how do you know you’re receiving the best quality data?
In this guide we’ll examine the differences between these two platforms– covering how data is sourced, platform UI, integrations and APIs, focus on customers, and how they work together to deliver exceptional market data.
At a Glance: ApartmentIQ vs. ILS Data Providers
ApartmentIQ is not an ILS Data Provider. In fact, it’s a multifamily data analysis platform that stands out for the way it sources data directly from property websites. Using AI technology to crawl pertinent information, users benefit from real-time unit availability, net effective rent (NER), and concessions data. This allows complete and customized comp sets to be delivered directly to your team, saving time and equipping them with the best market insights for better data-driven decisions.
ILS Data Providers rely heavily on third-party listing sites to gather data. This lack of ingenuity can lead to compromised data because they “scrape” listing sites rather than go directly to the source. Favoring advertisement sites aggregates old and outdated information, creating a subpar user experience and inadequate data.
It’s important to vet your data analysis partner, getting to know their methodology on data aggregation, platform experience, and product evolution plan. Here’s what to consider in the battle for best data:
Source of Data
Consuming quality data gives you the confidence to increase scale and make better decisions. Where that information comes from and how it’s sourced matters. Public data provides the most accurate and compliant insights. Private data, on the other hand, is often incomplete, plugged with duplications and renter information, which can lead to legal complications.
ApartmentIQ & Public Data
ApartmentIQ uses public data and AI technology to aggregate data across thousands of property websites down to the unit level. Crawling 15M apartments and rental properties daily, ApartmentIQ ensures accurate, compliant, and real-time data you can use to analyze area comps and make data-backed improvements across your property portfolio.
ILS Data Providers & Private Data
ILS Data Providers extract private data from third-party Listing Search Portals, often containing outdated and unreliable property details. Additionally, the data may have personal information about renters online habits and lease agreements (signed through advertising sites) attached to it.
To update listings, ILS Data Providers employ in-house or outsourced research teams who manually call and conduct online research for their adverts. With hundreds of thousands of properties advertised across multiple listing sites, imagine the time it takes for your units and property details to display accurately. This is the information ILS Data Providers are scraping and packaging up for you to make critical business decisions.
Indicators of Data Sourced from ILS Data Providers:
- Missing unit-specific availability: ILS Data Providers cannot drill down to the unit level, leading to incomplete and inconsistent competitive sets.
- Misaligned consent and PII standards: Unfamiliarity with industry standards and state-level consumer privacy laws is common for ILS Data Providers.
- Exact matching of amenities and fees: Data discrepancies among amenity offerings and fees are recurring across ILS advertising sites.
- Failure to detect hidden availability: Properties may withhold full availability from ILS Data Providers to cultivate an illusion of scarcity, evading detection by conventional ILS data providers.
- Omission of concessions: ILS platforms may exclude displaying featured concessions advertised on property websites, resulting in an incomplete representation of incentives.
- Risk of fake listings: By relying solely on ILS data, providers are susceptible to aggregating fraudulent listings, compromising data integrity.
Platform Interface
Shaping the user experience and improving usability are compelling attributes of any data analysis platform. It’s how you streamline processes to ramp up buy-in for company stakeholders. When comparing ApartmentIQ to ILS Data Providers, distinguishable characteristics emerge among their design and functionality offerings.
ApartmentIQ’s interface is designed to simplify market research using intuitive capabilities. Through its no-code layer, the platform empowers users to quickly adopt and effortlessly navigate to reporting tools for those who have little to no technical experience. The emphasis on a user-friendly platform ensures you can accelerate performance tasks, maintain application governance, and drive company-wide adoption and usage.
ILS Data Provider’s UI is characterized by outdated and complicated design, posing challenges to user engagement and platform comprehension. The interface is difficult to use, making it near-impossible to deploy reporting at a moment’s notice. With a deprioritization of the user experience due to budget constraints or lack of internal resources to allocate, ILS Data Providers fail to provide users with an intuitive platform experience, limiting their ability to leverage data effectively.
Indicators of an Interface from ILS Data Providers:
- Lack of enterprise user integrations. ILS Data Providers typically lack SSO integrations and limit the accessibility of platform users.
- Underequipped reporting functionality. Most ILS Data Providers are not equipped with comprehensive reporting features and cannot share their insights with others.
- Cumbersome engagement and analysis. Due to poor interface design and subpar data, users are left to process insights on a rather clunky platform.
API Integrations
Data integration enhances visibility into your competitors’ rental rates, inventory, and market scope in your preferred business tools.
ApartmentIQ offers a thorough marketplace of no-code BI integrations to sync, monitor, and share insights within your data environment. Some of these platforms include PowerBI, Domo, and Qlik Sense. Bring ApartmentIQ into your business applications and seamlessly circulate reports and critical market insights without having to depend on technical resources.
ILS Data Providers typically lack comprehensive BI integrations, which takes away users’ ability to work with their own tools. These restrictions create complex work processes as users must toggle between their dashboards.
API and Bulk Data Exporting:
Both ApartmentIQ and ILS Data Providers offer API access and bulk data exporting capabilities, facilitating data exchange and integration with external systems.
Unlike ILS Data Providers, ApartmentIQ users can retrieve metrics directly in their BI tools. Without integrations, users are restricted to a single source to obtain information.
Indicators of API Integrations from ILS Data Providers:
- Absent BI integrations: ILS Data Providers fall back on API to retrieve information since they generally don’t offer integrations.
Customer Focus
Company size, financial health, and industry expertise play significant roles in the ability to innovate and evolve to meet the needs of enterprise customers. Staying ahead of rapidly changing markets requires exceptional resources to deliver robust infrastructure and quality data.
ApartmentIQ has a team of 100+ industry experts and $30 million in raised capital to power innovation and excellence in its products and services. As part of the Rentable.co network, with 10+ years of experience, ApartmentIQ has the resources to scale product research and development to support customer growth, maintaining regulatory requirements and industry standards that safeguard PMC interests.
In contrast, ILS Data Providers typically operate on a smaller scale with 2-5 individuals. Bound by insufficient resources and short tenure, ILS Data Providers struggle to match the scale, scope, and compliance standards customers come to expect.
Indicators of Customer Focus from ILS Data Providers:
- Small team and operation tenure. Limited operations due to company size and even smaller industry tenure.
- Lack of insufficient funds for scalability. Product evolution and systems interoperability are generally prolonged or inadequate for enterprise requisites.
ApartmentIQ Serves Better Data for Rent Optimizations
You should feel confident using a data analysis platform to make optimization recommendations to your colleagues. And if you’re not, think about the potentially damaging outcome of using poor data. Don’t let that happen to you!
Data quality, operational reliability, and legal compliance are critical components of an accurate and reliable solution. ApartmentIQ is that platform. Its focus on accuracy, comprehensive coverage, and user-friendly interface makes it a preferred choice for enterprise property management companies, ownership, and investor groups.
Set your teams up for long-term success with ApartmentIQ’s dynamic multifamily data analysis solution.
