Almost everyone takes a loan to buy a house and you probably are no exception. Hence, property transaction can throw up the most diverse sets of data which circulates in loan filings, marketing firms as well as courts and numerous other sources. This data is invaluable for the loan traders who deals with mortgage bonds.
A big data start-up has realized the immense potential of this data and started transacting it so that new ways of trading could be opened up in this case. In fact, the kind of data that the company is unearthing is truly unsettling in its detail, which calls for certain concerns.
The immensity of the data
The company collects the most expansive kind of data such as what are the kind of shops that these borrowers tend to prefer to visit, whether these rooms are often rented out to Airbnb for some extra cash etc. Surely, this is opening up a whole new can of worms where investors know the zeal of the homeowners to pay their dues.
In fact, it also tells how they are trying to pay off the loans which indicates the kind of earnings that the owner has and the methods in which the person is trying to increase his monthly income. Surely, big data allows to have these impossible glances into a futuristic world where mortgage trading can become informational instead of simply being a sanctioning process.
Doing it in a flash
The greatest power of big data is that it has empowered companies to speed up their processes many million times. The volume of data that is aggregated through this process would have taken months for the big companies while now, it takes some seconds. Hence, lending and trading can open up new horizons with the help of big data. However, it is important to collect good data for better price control and loan sanctions.
In fact, the rented places can have varied prices precisely because of the difference between the amounts of loans. In fact, a good percentage point return can be possible if you start using intelligent data to trade mortgages. However, so much data being transacted between parties also contain data which can be extremely private. It is here privacy is becoming an ethical issue.
You are nothing but data
Viewing every person as a warehouse of data could be really problematic for more than one reason. For one, borrowers have no privacy whatsoever as consumer rights go out of the window. Since most consumers often have no clue regarding the amount or extent of information that are circulated, they can never know if particular information comes back to haunt or trouble them in the future.
For example, the information regarding race or religion may prompt particular kinds of biases in dealing with the loans and hence, anonymity is the order of the day. While the start-up claims that a good section of the data is anonymous, proper agreements need to be done so that executives get access to a select section of data and nothing else.