I wasn’t convinced "James" was a real person.
The organisation James works for (in its valuation fulfillment team!) provides information online about properties supposedly to help buyers and sellers make smarter, more informed property decisions.
It is one of several such sites.
Enter an address and it will show you where it is, sometimes with a photo, describe it and tell you when it was built and how much you might expect to pay for it should it be up for sale.
But the website I took issue with continues to post misleading information about my property even though I raised it with them some years ago.
Since I would not provide the correct information then, it did nothing.
What the photo shows is my letterbox.
In the distance you can see my neighbour’s house.
The description of my house is wrong, giving incorrect information about what it contains. The date it was built is decades out.
James suggested I could correct the information, but I didn’t see why that was my job.
I had no desire to have my property on the website.
He also told me, in what looked like a prepared spiel, under a helpful heading about why the firm displays this data/imagery, that property imagery was one of the most important data points about a property.
As an independent property data and analytics company, the outfit collected and acquired the rights to use a diverse range of property data (including imagery) from a variety of sources.
"We utilise this data to provide critical solutions and analytics for a range of industries (real estate, valuations, banking and finance, government, insurance and construction) and consumers (homeowners, buyers, renters and investors)."
I have no idea what critical solution was being provided involving my house, but hey ho, what would I know? I still have a burner phone.
He assured me the photo displayed was a Google street view of the external front of my property, therefore the imagery was correct, accurate and not misleading.
If I wanted to have it rectified I should take it up with Google.
(Theoretically, he was right because you could see my letterbox. The image was from 2008. However, a Google search now shows a more accurate photo taken in 2019 which features my house, not the neighbour’s.)
I told him it seemed a very strange way to do business to be informing people about properties but not doing anything to correct information which you have been told is wrong.
As I reminded him, it was not just the photo that was misleading/incorrect.
And, as I pointed out, if I did a Google search, I could quickly find the other photo.
If he had bothered to do the same, he could also have found similar sites to his with information about the house which differed markedly from his organisation’s.
He could even have gone to the QV site (which was admittedly still using the misleading 2008 photo but had other accurate information).
Eventually, the best James offered was to "attempt" to get a more updated Google street view but had no estimated time of when this would be possible.
"If no new information is provided we will be closing off this ticket with no response."
The First Born had to live through this email saga because he has been staying with me while he reroofs part of my house which was sporting a lacy look that was not so attractive in heavy rain.
He could not understand why I was bothering to annoy poor James. What did it matter to me what information was on this website? It didn’t affect me.
He was right about that. But, as he knows, sometimes I can get bloody-minded about inconsequential things.
If an organisation is purporting to be the leading property data, information, analytics and services provider in New Zealand and Australia, how come it couldn’t or wouldn’t get this right without my help? It proudly proclaims on its main website "accuracy is everything".
Increasingly, big data is being heralded as a problem solver, and there will be times when wrong information will affect people.
How will we establish the accuracy of the data and evidence to be used in the government’s social investment approach to funding early intervention?
If wrong conclusions are jumped to about people who will be targeted for who- knows-what interventions, how easy will it be to counter that?
I would have shared those wider concerns with my son, but his eyes had glazed over, his earmuffs were on and he was cranking up the power tools.
• Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
