Rocket Homes, a sister company to Quicken Loans that offers a real estate search portal and agent referral network, announced Wednesday it’s launching a new neighborhood trend reports platform. The platform provides both consumers and agents with recent trend data at a local level and allows it to be compared year-over-year.
Sam Vida | Photo credit: Rocket Homes
On the platform, users can view the median home price of a property and how that price is trending, whether its a buyers’ or sellers’ market, the number of homes for sale, how fast homes are selling and even whether homes are going for over or under their asking prices.
“What trends does well, is it takes all of this disparate real estate data that is generally accessible at hundreds of different websites and people have to put into Excel spreadsheets to make sense of it,” Rocket Homes President Sam Vida told Inman. “We take that hyperlocal data and we spent a lot of time in our labs turning it into understandable information to any consumer that has some experience or no experience in buying or selling a home.”
The platform is intended for all types of consumers — including buyers and sellers — and could even be a boon to agents, Vida said. Rocket Homes runs a referral network, where it will connect agents with consumers shopping for homes in an exchange for a referral fee. The referral platform currently boasts 25,000 agents across all 50 states and 3,100 counties in America, according to Rocket Homes. Vida said a number of agents have already reached out to the company about using the tool outside of Rocket Homes in their own comparative market analysis reports.
Photo credit: Rocket Homes
“The purpose of the trend report is to really speak to any of those audiences,” Vida said. “Even agents for that matter, because agents look at having a consumer that’s educated as a really good thing.”
“Our agents love when our consumers are more knowledgeable and have a proper expectation around a market place,” Vida added.
Vida was also clear, in conversation with Inman that the purpose of the platform isn’t to take business away from the agent. The agent, according to Vida, is the core of the company’s business. The agent has, at one time, served as a gatekeeper of information in the industry, but Vida thinks that ship has sailed with the proliferation of real estate portals.
“Consumers look to get information as quickly as possible, Vida said. “If you look at the hundreds of different web portals out there and the needs that they’re solving, I don’t think this is penetrating or piercing that.”
“I think this is consistent with the evolution of consumer expectation and I think most agents understand that,” Vida added. “For us, and I think this is really important, we’re not in the business of replacing agents. Our core business is literally the agent.”
The announcement of the new neighborhood trends platform comes at a time when Rocket Homes, which launched in September 2018 as the rebranded In-House Realty, has reached a coverage area of more than 50 percent of the nation’s listings, with more than 1.6 million active listings.
The company will also release property reports in the coming months, which will display similar information as the trends reports, but for individual homes. Consumers will be able to use the property report as a wealth management tool to track their own home and buyers will be able to get more specific insights into homes.
