what do you do when the collateral does not have a physical address? You may know where it is located but no physical address to aquire a for sure cra code. Do the best you can or is there any guideline for this type of item.
Have a good day

I would start in on an answer but could you clarify what type of collateral you are referring to in general?

If you know where it is located go to American Factfinder and look it up on a census tract map provided by the US Census Bureau. Put in a nearby address and do a search

http://factfinder.census.gov/

If you have a problem with that send me PM with description of where property is and I'll give it to you. I.E. The NE corner of the intersection of SR 209 and XYZ Road. Include State and County and city name

Jim I owe you an apology. I hit the wrong button and edited your post instead of replying as me. I'm really sorry I did that.

What Jim said before I accidentaly deleted it was

You can GEOCODE by zip code if you have the right software

You have a choice of using the location of the proceeds (the collateral address) OR the location of the business. If you don't have an easy collateral address, don't make life crazy, use the general business address

And geocoding by zip alone is only going to work if you have a zip that covers an entire census tract. This is pretty rare. Using zip only as a geocode factor can lead to significant data integrity issues during exam.

Thnaks you all for your assistance. I have one other question.
The company who does the analysis for us disregards any address where they see a po box. Of course this causes $ amount etc not to be included. They are seeing this off the n/address. On our system we have to use this for the mailing address. We've discussed various options but so far the ones we've looked at would caouse a real problem ain other areas. How do some of your banks handle the information when there is a po box. Even though we can aquire the code they dont seem to want to take because of the other reason. I dont have the name of the company or program.

The zip+4 code and even zip+2 are perfectly acceptable geocodes. Probably 30%-40% of all geocoding is done using zip codes and not specific street addresses. Part of all geocoding engines is the US Post Office Database which contains over 70 million addresses and zip codes and is updated every 60 days. Although the companies that provide geocode programs do not always update their database that often.

The more digits in a zip code the smaller the geographic area used to place a "centroid" which designates the census tract code.

Using just the 5 digit zip code is less accurate as the 5 digits cover larger geographic area which may, or may not in rural areas, contain multiple census tracts.

Many CRA reportable loans have a different address from the mailing address.For mailing purposes you may have a PO Box address. But for CRA reporting purposes you "must" use an actual street address. The business or individial does not live in a PO Box and does have a real address. Regulations require the bank to provide an address and make every effort to accurately geocode that address.

If you are only sending a file for geocoding that is of mailing address you have a problem. You will need to manually change the PO Box address to a geocodable address.

I have recommened for years that banks create new address fields on the main frame to be used for CRA address purposes. That way you will avoid the conflict.

Thanks,Don,
I like the seperate address on the mainframe. Now for this person, me, who is not real savy on how to do this can you give me a general direction on how to proceed. Also when you speak of , mainframe, is this some thing that will go along with the banks system to keep updated current loans yet show crA or is this like a spreadsheet on excell that would have to be updated for the purpose of this analysis area.
We get the actual physical address for the cra, but because of the way the company looks at things it assumes we dont get the correct one because it sees a po box. This information just came to our attention and now were trying to see how to correct and get all counted.
Thnaks again to all who answered

Mainframe computer systems allow you to add customized data fields. ITI systems calls them Flex Data fields.

Set up separate fields for CRAAddress, CRACity, CRAState, CRAZip. You might also include borrower income

Make sure these fields are completed on all loans even if the mailing address is the same as the CRA address. That way if the field is left blank you know someone missed it. Don't say only enter a CRA address if it's different.

By having these fields completed on all loans you simply download the CRA address fields and not the mailing address to your geocoder.

It also resolves the problem with inconsistencies with the way folks enter mailing addresses in the system. Many systems have 4 or 5 address fields, and some may enter a street address in field 2 and some will enter it in field 3. This means that before geocoding can happen the address fields have to be merge together in order to get one address field the geocoder can use.

I'm not sure of where you are getting the data to send to the geocoder. So give me a call at 702-263-9706 and we can discuss the process you are using.

Here is an article I wrote that may help you.

http://www.bankersonline.com/compliance/datacollection.html

We also use the ITI flex data to put in our CRA addresses. But believe it or not, we still get P.O. boxes in there. Grrrrrrr. Off with their heads.

Thanks for your help and the information. I will check
futher with our main office and see if I can find out about
the company and their process. If I can locate some information, I'll give you a call. It may be a few weks before I can get some information as we have "company" coming to visit the bank.
Thanks again

Don I should have been clearer and said that "zip" alone is not enough. Zip plus is a different story, but I've talked to so many banks who think "zip" (the five digit code alone) works for geocoding that my mind went right there

Anon with PO Box problems. I try to remind my staff that people are not able to operate a business out of a PO Box. It's difficult enough at a regular sized desk to fit a computer and a printer, let alone squeeze it into one of those little boxes For CRA purposes we are required to report the "real" or "physical" address of the business or the collateral proceeds. It's not an option.

Take Don's advice and call him, but also take this advice if you can:

First, when you figure out the "fix" with Don, I'm sure he's going to suggest you go back and check your old data (anything that will be in this exam period that was geocoded prior to your fix). You only need to screw up 5% of your address field to be required to scrub 100% of your data and resubmit. IT sounds like this is even more of a problem than you are thinking, since you're probably using inappropriate mailing addresses as business addresses as well, but haven't caught them because they weren't PO Boxes. A data integrity check internally is in order!

And, before you send those files off to be geocoded, consider a scrub yourself first. We preform a few scrubs of the data prior to geocoding, including filtering out PO Boxes and sending the lenders notes to give us the right information. In my case it's a waste of staff time to fix this, but in yours, you've paid someone to find you a geocode and not provided them with the tools necessary to do so, which might prove costly in the long run!