AddressFixer MKII Usage Guide
A magical miracle cure for problematic addresses in your lists
Use this tool
About
Sometimes, you end up in a situation where you have a list of addresses but they can't be used without some wrangling. For example:
- A county list of tax delinquents has the street addresses, but not city/state/zip, and you need that to skip trace
- You have some driving for dollars leads that you wrote down, but you need the city/state/zip and the addresses themselves are missing predirections and suffixes, like 'N', and 'Ave.'
- You have a list with the address and zip code, but need the city/state
- There are general holes in the data, some rows have cities, some have states, some have zip codes
- You have addresses, but they are all in one cell, IE: '123 W Candy Lane, DeLand, FL 32720' but you want it split out into columns
- You have addresses split up into columns, but you want them all in one cell, IE merge '123 W Candy Lane', 'DeLand', 'FL', '32720' into '123 W Candy Lane, DeLand, FL 32720'
Yikes! These are very common challenges you may face, especially if you're working with ugly county lists.
AddressFixer MKII can solve all of these tasks and more, by taking advantage of something called 'Geocoding'. Geocoding is normally the conversion of an address into GPS coordinates, but modern Geocoders not only provide that conversion, but they also have some smart algorithms that make the best guess for what an address should be based on limited or partial address information.
By passing in address fragments, the Geocoder does the heavy lifting and we can pull back structured address details for filling in the data gaps. This tool does that!
Data appended
When AddressFixer MKII successfully finds an address, new fields will be added to your list including:
- The full address ('321 W Pensylvania Ave, DeLand, FL 32720')
- The street number ('321')
- The street ('W Pennsylvania Ave')
- The street address ('321 W Pennsylvania Ave')
- City ('DeLand')
- State ('FL')
- ZIP code ('32720')
- County ('Volusia')
- Country ('US')
- Lattitude and Longitude
- Source of the data, usually either local datasets or a national census dataset
- Accuracy rating, between 0 and 1 indicating precision of result based on the search query
- Accuracy type, rooftop or range_interpolation is ideal
- The search query, you use this to quality control the configuration
Data source and quality
Addresses are geocoded on the spot using Geocod.io, using your API key. Geocod.io is a leading geocoder service, and you can trust their quality.
Using AddressFixer MKII
AddressFixer MKII is fairly straightforward to use. Upload a CSV file with your leads, configure the columns so the system can understand how to read the addresses, then you can run the program. Once your list is processed, you can download it on the spot. It's pretty fast.
Limitations & best practices
It is very important to be mindful of your address precision. Be as localizing with the supplementary fields as possible, but don't localize too far if your addresses don't reflect that. Basically, if you have a list of leads from the whole state, don't supplement a specific city state zip because the hitrate will be lower, or even wrong. If all your addresses are in a specific zip code, but may be from a couple of cities, supplement the zip code but not the city.
If you aren't sure how to best configure your address fields, feel free to reach out to Noah for help. Remember that you have a generous free quota each day with Geocodio, so if you make a mistake it may not cost anything to run it again.
This system has not been used with a gigantic list. If something breaks, let me know!
Working with Geocod.io
This system requires an API key from Geocod.io to work. Review the usage video for how this works.
Finally, Geocod.io has a very generous daily free quota of 2500 (at the time of writing), and then very cheap additional searches ($0.50 for every 1000 after the quota). Most lists won't even hit the daily quota.
Subscriber benefits
Professional plan subscribers can use the full-service list work, where they can simply email me their list and I will deliver it promptly with the data appended. Both professional and entrepreneur plan subscribers are welcome to enhanced consultations, where we can work together to figure out the best way to approach any sort of list work or real estate technology logistics. Pay as you go members can ask for consultations depending on availability. All users recieve technical support.
Support
If there are technical issues with this tool, contact Noah from the support page. REIZoom subscribers are welcome to ask for general advice or other logistic questions regarding these spreadsheets, and professional subscribers can send the lists to Noah for total-service.