Following Monday's news that CoreLogic had reached an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding its acquisition of DataQuick, the company on late Tuesday announced that it had closed the transaction.
As part of the deal, CoreLogic has also acquired valuations solutions provider Marshall & Swift/Boeckh (MSB) and the credit and flood services operations of DataQuick Lending Solutions from the Decision Insight Information Group for a total of $661 million.
‘The acquisition of MSB and DataQuick significantly expands our footprint in property and casualty insurance and adds scale to our existing property data and analytics business,’ says Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic, in a statement. ‘The combination of MSB and our existing geo-spatial business capabilities and property-related data assets allows CoreLogic to provide our clients in the insurance industry with new and unique insights into underwriting property coverage, as well as managing natural hazard risks and claims.
‘The combination of CoreLogic, MSB and DataQuick should yield significant future growth opportunities through the introduction of new products, data-enabled services and workflow tools, which draw from a wide range of gold-standard data assets and analytical capabilities,’ Nallathambi adds.
As stipulated by the FTC, CoreLogic is to license to RealtyTrac its national assessor and recorder bulk data, as well as several ancillary data sets that DataQuick provides to its customers. CoreLogic notes in its announcement that the solutions will be licensed to RealtyTrac "for a limited term."
The FTC had initially opposed the deal out of concern that it would lead to the elimination of one of only three companies delivering national assessor and recorder bulk data – CoreLogic, DataQuick and RealtyTrac – thus increasing the risk of anticompetitive coordination between the remaining two market participants.
More specifically, the FTC feared that the deal would give CoreLogic an edge on RealtyTrac in terms of products and services and would use its market dominance to raise prices and gauge customers.
To resolve that concern, the FTC's settlement requires CoreLogic to license to RealtyTrac national assessor and recorder bulk data, as well as several ancillary data sets that DataQuick provides to its customers, so as to level the competitive playing field between the two companies.
The FTC announced on Monday that before the agreement is finalized, it would be subject to public comment for 30 days, through April 23. As a result, some people may have been surprised to learn the next day that CoreLogic had already closed the transaction.