Matching on Legal Description

Automated matching on legal descriptions is difficult and almost unheard of. Legal descriptions are a common component of real estate data, but unlike names and addresses, they are very free-form and difficult for most database software to search. Even if keywords are picked out, their meaning is lost to most programs. Legal descriptions however, are 'legally' a unique identifier of a piece of real estate and are therefore important for data processing in the real estate industry.

A few typical legal descriptions:

Accumatch has software that can search a database accurately and thoroughly using names, addresses and legal descriptions to find unique account numbers, such as parcel numbers. Mortgage companies, title companies, county governments, and many others in the real estate industry need parcel numbers for property tax payments, owner name updates, title searches, and many other things.

Below are a couple of examples of what Accumatch's matching software can do. In white is the record that needs to be matched to another record on the database, and in blue is the actual matching record from the database. In both cases, the names and addresses either did not match or matched incompletely. However, the subdivisions, lots, blocks, and sections matched, adding greatly to the confidence that the matching records were the correct ones. These examples are oversimplified - much more complexity is involved in the determination of what constitutes a 'good match' - but they help illustrate the concept.