HOUSINGNEWS REPORT
DATA-FED DISRUPTION IN REAL ESTATE
SINGLE FAMILY RENTAL RETURNS BY COUNTY: 2018
of how these hedge funds drive everything is based on quants … it’s computers doing the trading … and this is going to spill over into the real estate market.”
2018 ANNUAL GROSS RENTAL YIELD
2.3%
28.6%
ROOFSTOCK:
Disrupting Single Family Rentals Roofstock raised $35 million in Series C funding in 2017, according to the RE:Tech report, which listed that as one of the top 20 notable real estate startup fundraising deals for the year. “It has been an attractive time to raise money in real estate and fintech,” said Gary Beasley, CEO and co— founder of the online marketplace for buying and selling single family rental investment property outside of the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). “Lots of capital chasing a relatively few companies.” Roofstock was born out of some of the inefficiencies identified when hedge- fund thinking collided with the real estate marketplace in the wake of the Great Recession.
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who has a degree in mathematics and built out the technology driving the company’s predictive modeling. “That’s what makes us really special. We score parts of Florida completely different than we do in New York.” Democratizing Big Data Sweir claimed that Offrs.com is disruptive not only because of the accuracy of its inventory-predicting model — he said the model accurately predicts 70 percent of all U.S. listings in advance — but also because the model is made available to the masses at an affordable price point. “We democratize big data,” he said. “Our customers might buy a very small zip code and it might be very affordable to access this valuable data and analytics. … Before it would be very time consuming and costly for them.” Swier also noted that Offrs.com provides marketing assistance for agents as well to help them put big data into action.
“We provide templates and campaign systems for them to use,” he said. “You could effectively create a digital postcard on Facebook to the homeowners who score high on our algorithm for very little money.” Although Offrs.com is primarily applying its predictive analytics to disrupt access to future housing inventory on a transaction-by- transaction basis, the model could eventually disrupt housing inventory on a macro basis, according to Swier. the single transaction we are also predicting the broader market,” he said. “This will be a living and breathing machine … and that will impact the way people will look at the market. “The long tail of predictive analytics is this is really going to drive the entire industry,” Swier continued, noting that while predictive analytics is newer to real estate, it’s long been used in other industries. “The entirety “We are predicting the single transaction, and by predicting
In 2009, firms like Blackstone, Starwood Capital Group, Colony Financial, and American Homes
for Rent each began purchasing tens of thousands of single family homes to hold as rentals — lured by discounted foreclosure properties and plummeting homeownership rates that foreshadowed a strong rental market in the years ahead.
Inefficiencies in the real estate marketplace grated against the data-
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JUNE 2018 | ATTOM DATA SOLUTIONS
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