Property Newsletter | September 2021

What’s in an address?

How Lightstone can help you get to your market – first time, every time

Businesses are looking to improve the way they gather and use customer, supplier and employee addresses, an imperative being driven by the growth of ecommerce.

Addresses are necessary for many business engagements, from creating customer profiles and delivering goods to generating supplier information and employee contact details. And this information is typically generated from online forms, physical forms and capturing data from third party sources such as your utility bills.

Location intelligence via efficiently adapting an address plays an important part in decision-making and Lightstone’s unique approach to address data and geography to enable your business to harness the combined power of data sets within our search capability.

Lightstone uses two processes:

Search API: Lightstone’s real time address capture / verification tool which verifies addresses at point of entry, and we return a full database that recognizes the South African landscape.

Geocoding: Lightstone understands the South African property landscape and offers a geocoding service that verifies addresses, suburb and postal code alignment and checks whether an address will result in a successful delivery.

Lightstone has encountered many uses for addresses and this example highlights how important it is to get an address right: Company x runs its business via multiple sales agents who offer goods to purchase via an online portal. The success of the sale is dependent on the delivery of the product to multiple addresses. Lightstone’s engagement with the company has been to ensure that customer loyalty is maintained by eliminating delivery errors because of incorrect addressing.

Address challenges that we have frequently encountered:

Incomplete address where one or more of the following variables is incorrect or missing – house number, street name or number, estate name vs road name in estate, apartment number, town or city name, province, postal code.

Typos and address format – in grammar and language, township addresses are not unified as residential addresses in suburbs are, units and blocks, and block numbers and letters are often used interchangeably.

User behaviour – user wants to input unverified address data and for the machine to select the best possible verified matching address; a user wants to use the XY of a point returned from 3rd party map and return the closest property to the XY they selected from the map; user wants to process a set of unverified or dirty address data and for the machine to select the best possible verified outcome and enrich with risk metrics as required; suburb / postal code alignment via the use of an external spatial file.