Infutor’s Historical Property, Real Estate Data Aids Stanford Research

New study finds home foreclosures can have devastating long-term effects

As the pandemic continues to impact the U.S. economy and many fear a wave of foreclosures, a new study from Stanford economist Rebecca Diamond using Infutor’s robust historical and property data sheds light on the long-term impacts of home foreclosures on economic well-being.

Looking at Infutor’s Identity Graph of 260M individuals and 125M households alongside deeds and foreclosure court records gave the researchers a unique lens to measure what happens to households after a foreclosure.

Diamond’s findings, with help from co-authors Rose Tan, a Stanford PhD student, and Adam Guren of Boston University, were released as a working paper titled, The Effect of Foreclosures on Homeowners, Tenants, and Landlords, in June 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The research shows that foreclosures make homeowners less likely to buy another house in subsequent years, their living arrangements become less secure, and they default on other debts more often.

“Being able to track migration patterns with Infutor’s data has opened the doors to new research that is critical to understanding the economic impacts of neighborhood choice and neighborhood changes,” said Diamond. “In this study we found that alternatives to foreclosures could be helpful to households and the economy at large.”

Next up on Diamond’s research agenda is a study on immigrants and innovation that also uses Infutor’s data.

Infutor compiles deterministic, authoritative and permissible data from sources such as telephone data, deed and property information, subscription services and numerous other privacy and security-compliant sources. Infutor combines these records into a single identity graph that identifies individuals and links particular records to a single individual. The result is a list of unique individual residential histories.

In addition to Stanford, institutions and research organizations like the Urban Institute, Notre Dame, Penn State University and UpJohn Institute, among others, have turned to Infutor for its unique and authoritative datasets to help support social and economic research initiatives.