Delivering the Best in Information & Inventory
RealtyTrac is Ready to Optimize Established Strengths & New Ones
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
RealtyTrac, one of the oldest and most established names in the web-based real estate space, is putting “the pedal to the metal,” as parent company ATTOM Data Solutions’ CEO Rob Barber puts it—and, as is typical for the company, the timing is perfect.
“When we first started thinking about a re-launch of the RealtyTrac.com platform, we were aiming for springtime in 2021. When COVID-19 emerged on the scene, that goal became more imperative because of the many forbearance programs that are likely, based on current policies, to expire in the fall of this year,” explained Barber, who was integrally involved in hiring entrepreneurial real estate veteran Ohan Antebian to help lead the buildout of the new product. Antebian is general manager of ATTOM’s RealtyTrac segment.
Rob Barber 
Ohan Antebian
Antebian is, in his own words, “data-minded,” and within the real estate data industry he is known for fiercely championing the concept of data transparency long before others in the sector were particularly concerned with the idea. Antebian began his career at Realtor.com. “Back in the early 2000s, the idea of data transparency in real estate meant publishing [information about] for-sale homes online,” Antebian explained. “I also believed it was so important to make expansive content available on properties so that an investor could get a comprehensive insight on the asset—to the point where one company I worked with hired professional writers from the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune to help build out the context around the homes published on the site.”
That venture ended with the 2009 sale of that business to the National Association of Realtors (NAR) where it was reborn as a REALTOR® access-only productivity tool. RPR (the reborn name of the project) was the ideal preparation for Antebian’s role with RealtyTrac. “Imagine viewing a single graph that elegantly summarizes all events on a property, such as deed transfer, notice of default, sale, etc., to enable the user to assess the property.” he said. “The effort behind that elegant, simplified presentation is monumental. At RealtyTrac, our ambition is to take on those monumental efforts for the benefit of the individual investor. These data-driven yet simplified insights are needed to make obvious and objective decisions.”
Antebian, himself a veteran in real estate, joined RealtyTrac in October 2019. He was already an ATTOM customer and had a clear vision of how RealtyTrac.com should serve existing investors and new ones. “RealtyTrac has a core loyal following of longstanding customers,” he said. “We closely examined this distilled population of users to uncover the value they are deriving from using the website.” The value, Antebian and his team realized, was the comprehensiveness of the data. The discovery served as a blueprint in the architecture of the new platform.
“RealtyTrac has a population of long-term ‘power users’ who have been with the company for years and years,” Barber added. “The new product delivers and builds on the promises of the old product but with a modernized tech stack and user interface.”
A Roadmap Based on Real Needs of Active Investors
The appeal of RealtyTrac for real estate investors has always hinged on the company’s access to large amounts of timely, relevant data and the platform’s ability to aggregate that data in meaningful ways. When the RealtyTrac team set out to invest in “modernizing” the website that became familiar to many in 2007 as the housing crash and subsequent global financial meltdown rocked United States homeowners and real estate investors, it was imperative to sustain the legacy and integrity of the data that the company had built over the previous
two decades.
“We knew how important it would be for investors to be able to search for certain types of properties in clearly delineated areas and to find as much information as possible about specific addresses,” Barber said. “Then, we homed in on how to provide and present a comprehensive view of a property and the surrounding community to our subscribers.”
This aggregation and compilation of data is “Phase I” of RealtyTrac’s ongoing relaunch, which Barber refers to as the “search-and-discovery phase”. The next phase (Phase II) will expand the value of that information using Antebian’s concept of elegant transparency, tying in analysis and decision-making features designed to help individual investors make highly customized decisions based on the latest information available about a property. Naturally, this will involve software development and the assembly of a toolbox on a scale to match the company’s existing scale of real estate data.
“We want to deliver a data analytics roadmap to our customers that includes all the information RealtyTrac can access about a given address that is not in the public domain,” Barber said. “Our goal is to always help our customers make better-informed real estate decisions.”
That toolbox will include automated valuation models, a variety of lending and leverage models, and even theoretical equity models that will enable investors to compare and contrast potential strategies for different properties in the same area. “We have access to so much information,” Antebian said proudly. “It is really exciting to see how this data can be made available to empower the individual investor. That is where we want to continue to succeed and continue to double down.”
Eventually, the company roadmap will not only include access to data and the most modern analytical tools in the industry but also the ability to complete transactions on the RealtyTrac platform. “Phase III brings all the parties who already use and benefit from RealtyTrac together, allowing buyers and sellers to initiate and then complete the sale of a home,” Barber said proudly.
Empowering Investors Through Expansion of Inventory & Insight
When Barber and Antebian talk about empowering investors, their vision is clear and the goals tangible:
- A larger volume of available inventory
- A higher-quality and higher volume of time-sensitive data
- The information, insight, and tools necessary for investors to leverage the advantages that come with the first two points.
Empowering the individual investor involves expanding access to the available inventory, increasing that investor’s ability to evaluate assets in that inventory, and providing the resources necessary to make transactions happen.
“The barriers [for individual investors] are already coming down in other industries. Yet, in real estate, there has not previously been a successful platform that has truly taken the leap and fully empowered the individual investor,” Antebian said. “Professional investment firms have their own tools and means of asset discovery, but RealtyTrac believes it is imperative we continue to double down on serving the individual investor.” At this point, Barber notes many of these professional firms are ATTOM Data clients.
“The foreclosure inventory on RealtyTrac is more complete than what you will find on any other website,” Barber said. “In fact, much of the information you find on third-party sites is actually RealtyTrac data. But our users gain access to additional analysis and unique, differentiating factors we collect on our own because we know that timely information is so critical in real estate.” Thanks to parent company ATTOM, RealtyTrac has access to a variety of aggregated real estate data from dozens of sources. That data may then be incorporated into a variety of analytical tools to further clarify the status of a potential acquisition.
Antebian sees the aspect of “clarification” of information as an avenue filled with potential, and his plans for the next iterations of the platform are grand. Nevertheless, he prefers to stay focused on the immediate and near-term value for investors, noting that it is too easy to let futuristic ideas become “a little dreamy and less practical”. He has no intention of letting the RealtyTrac platform go in a direction anything less than productive and practical for its users and keeps his outlook confined to resources available at present or in the near future.
“One of the first things we know we can do for the industry and for real estate investors is to expand the inventory,” Antebian said. “One of the biggest challenges right now in the real estate market in general is inventory, and we can already expand the information an investor can access about available foreclosures and inventory in almost any market.” However, RealtyTrac is not going to be limited to foreclosure inventory. Antebian is also looking at ways to help investors “identify other unique investment opportunities that exist outside of foreclosures and bring that to the table as well.”
Next, he says, comes the “natural transition” to analytical tools. This is where it gets exciting, with software and programming in the works that will help investors identify and even create custom indicators based on personal investment strategies. For example, a property could be scored based on the likelihood that it might be a successful fix-and-flip deal, a successful rehab-and-rent deal, etc. Combined with RealtyTrac’s deductive software that may even enable investors to obtain equity estimates and the platform’s emphasis on posting the timeliest information available about property status (foreclosure, pre-foreclosure, etc.), there is powerful potential in the combination.
“We want to give investors tools that are simple enough, yet sophisticated and powerful enough to provide them the insights they need based on their own input,” Antebian said.
Barber concluded, “We are putting the tools to succeed in a changing macroenvironment into the hands of investors themselves. Those tools and our information and data are going to give investors more options—regardless of inventory volume or market conditions—in the future than they ever had in the past.”
Sidebar 1:
A Closer Look: Does the Data Show Another Housing Crash Coming?
Many of today’s active real estate investors have never experienced a “down” housing market. Although they may have learned about the housing crash and even experienced it firsthand in a childhood home, if an investor started investing in real estate after June 2009, then they have never been active in a down market. Some analysts say change could be coming, however, since the U.S. economy officially entered a recession in February 2020, thus ending the longest economic expansion in the history of the United States.
Of course, it is well known at this point that most of the national housing market did not follow when the economy took a COVID-induced dive. However, this does not, as real estate investors well know, mean that there has been no collateral damage in the industry. In fact, thousands of so-called “small” landlords, individual or “mom-and-pop” real estate investors, are facing foreclosure themselves due to public policy that prevents eviction of non-paying tenants.
Many homeowners who are currently leveraging mortgage forbearance programs also know they face foreclosure when these programs expire, likely toward the end of 2021. While the resulting wave of pre-foreclosure and foreclosure properties is unlikely to spark the kind of crash that occurred in the mid-2000s as a result of unsound lending practices, it is going to change the market in stark and meaningful ways.
Rob Barber, CEO of RealtyTrac parent company ATTOM, says investors should be prepared to act as soon as changes begin to manifest in the markets. “We are forecasting internally that the forbearance programs and eviction moratoriums are going to start expiring this year, so we begin to see meaningful, measurable increases in inventory toward the third or fourth quarter,” he said.
Barber described real estate investors as performing a “balancing act” at present, monitoring the state of the market carefully so they are ready to act when the environment moves “from one of low inventory to one of higher inventory”. He noted current RealtyTrac users are already accessing the platform’s massive database to identify investment opportunities in the current scarce environment and predicted the challenge for investors as this year progresses will be twofold:
- Increasing supply
- Multiple potentially viable strategic options
“The challenge will be accurately assessing the trade-off between strategies, and that is where
RealtyTrac is ready,” he said. “Our investors are going to have more optionality in the future than any investors have had before.”
Learn more about RealtyTrac and sign up for a free 7-day test of the platform at www.RealtyTrac.com.
Sidebar 2:
From Network to Net Worth: Taking Transactions from Start to Finish
It is the exceedingly rare real estate investor who has never come across the industry axiom, “Your network is your net worth.” While there are many different “spins” on this concept, most investors agree that their ability to create meaningful relationships with other investors and other real estate professionals is a crucial facet of success in real estate. It will come as no surprise, then, that RealtyTrac has been helping investors build out their networks for more than 20 years via the company’s data aggregators, agents, brokers, and industry lenders.
“Real estate agents are, themselves, an extremely important facet of the RealtyTrac platform,” Rob Barber, CEO of RealtyTrac parent company ATTOM, emphasized. “They are so active in the investment segment of the market. The updated platform has features, data, and functionality customized for real estate agents who specialize in working with investors or who are, themselves, real estate investors. They serve as trusted advisors and active participants in the industry; we have not forgotten them as we formulated our product strategy.”
Ohan Antebian, general manager of ATTOM’s real estate data websites, noted that including real estate agents is just the beginning of RealtyTrac’s networking capabilities. “Real estate investing is all about building meaningful partnerships to execute transactions,” he explained. “That means you need an agent who is familiar with working with real estate investors. You need lenders who specialize in accessing leverage for real estate investors. You need so many real estate-related professionals who understand not just real estate, but also real estate investing. RealtyTrac is extending that value proposition by continuing to build and expand its professional networks.”
The platform will not stop with simply finding professionals who purport to be “investor-friendly,” however. “For investors, it is so important to find the professionals that specialize in delivering the value that you need for your strategies and projects,” Antebian said. “We are focused on building networks that deliver that kind of value to real estate investors on our platform.”
Learn more about RealtyTrac’s agent network and other real estate professionals’ networks at RealtyTrac.com.
