Automating Compliance for Real Estate Buyer Notification Inspections

A municipal government was facing compliance issues with its Buyer Notification Inspection ordinance, which required sellers of real estate to complete an inspection before the sale. Many sellers were failing to comply, leading to enforcement challenges and inefficiencies.

Challenges Faced

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• Sellers were not following the ordinance, leading to non-compliant property sales.
• The municipality lacked an automated way to identify properties that required notification inspections.
• The real estate listings lacked a clear identifier to directly match them to records in the ERP system.
• The compliance team manually cross-referenced listings, which was time-consuming and prone to errors.

Our Approach & Process

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To automate the compliance process, we developed a custom script that:

1. Retrieved real estate listings via an API call to the client’s ERP system, providing an updated dataset of properties on the market.
2. Extracted a list of Buyer Notification Inspections from the ERP system to determine which properties had already complied.
3. Created an intelligent address-matching function that compared property addresses in both datasets, achieving a 100% confirmation rate despite no clear unique identifier.
4. Generated an output file for the compliance team, listing properties that required enforcement action.
5. Enabled automated communication, allowing the municipality to send letters to sellers, notifying them of their requirement to complete the inspection.

Technologies used:

• API integration with the ERP system to retrieve real estate listings.
• Python scripting to process and match addresses between datasets.
• Fuzzy address matching algorithms to ensure 100% accuracy.
• Automated report generation for client distribution.