A LightBox API customer success story
- Instead of buying property data in bulk and hosting it on its own servers, Peoples Company takes advantage of LightBox APIs.
- APIs streamline the company’s workflow and help it optimize employee time.
- Not having to manage property and parcel data collection allows the company to spend more time focusing on its customers.
Peoples Company provides integrated land solutions as one of the few firms with core competencies in land brokerage, agricultural appraisal, land and energy management, crop insurance, and capital markets, providing clients with a one-stop solution for agricultural transactions across the United States. Delivering personalized land services in every major agricultural market, Peoples Company’s local land professionals are experienced in working with non-operating landowners, farmers, institutional investors, and family offices. We recently caught up with Chief Technology Officer, Kaustubh Bhalerao, to learn how Peoples Company benefits from using LightBox APIs.
How did you choose LightBox?
One of the key things we need is the ability to quickly find a subject property. Manually, this can take hours of work. We evaluated a number of solutions and concluded that LightBox would give us the most value. Using LightBox, we are able to search by owner name, APN, and location to quickly find a subject property. In addition to efficiency, LightBox has great documentation, and the data is trustworthy. We were grateful for the onboarding experience and continual help your support team provided.
What specific problems and or challenges did the APIs solve for you?
We were looking for a way to find agricultural parcels and filter the data to find the properties we need and create downstream documents. We need to be able to connect boundaries to other data sources. Instead of buying data in bulk, we chose to use LightBox’s APIs. The breadth of data LightBox delivers made it an easy choice. We take advantage of the Parcel, Assessment and Geocoding APIs and plan to integrate the APN Lookup API in the future. With this approach, we don’t require a server to host databases, and that’s a meaningful difference. LightBox APIs are also easy to set up—we were up and running in about two weeks, building out our internal workflow tools. We continue to find ways to optimize the platform.
What has been the most helpful solution so far?
We like the parcel search features, such as the owner’s name filter and adjacent parcel search, so that we can locate a property quickly. If we select several parcels, we need to determine who owns which one. We can look for properties based on factors such as county and owner name. Then we find out what those parcels look like on the map, use a tool to select the right one, and convert them into farm boundaries. We also use the area of interest look-up. We can turn on a switch and all the parcels that meet the criteria show up. I like the fact that we have a consistent workflow throughout the office. Everyone uses LightBox as their primary way to create map boundaries and identify ownership.
Would you recommend LightBox APIs to fellow chief technology officers or other tech colleagues? If so, what would you tell them?
First off, LightBox APIs are great. They allow us to add a critical dataset without having to build internal expertise to ingest the data and build internal APIs around that data. I also like the fact that LightBox is documenting the APIs and keeping the documentation current. APIs are a faster way to get there than creating and maintaining your own internal platform. That’s the real value proposition. Total cost of ownership is much smaller with LightBox. Also, data is a challenge in and of itself—collecting and maintaining it can be difficult, and there are a lot of hidden costs. Hunting for data is time-consuming and can lead to missed opportunities. LightBox’s dedicated system engineers know what they’re doing, saving us the need to have experts on staff. Having data that’s easy to access and analyze at our fingertips allows us to focus on our customers.
Learn more about how you can unlock insights with accurate and comprehensive data for the entire CRE workflow. Visit our developer portal for more information on how to power your digital workflow using comprehensive property and location intelligence data from LightBox.
