HouseCanary Closes $33 Million Series A Funding, Seeks to Disrupt the Real Estate Market

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- HouseCanary, a real estate analytics company leveraging data science to accurately value and forecast over 18,000 U.S. residential markets and 100 million properties, today announced its Series A funding round with $33 million in backing from prominent technology investors, including Hillspire (Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's family office), Alpha Edison, ECA Ventures and Raven Ventures.

The data-driven company is part of a wave of technology-fueled transformation sweeping the $36 trillion residential real estate industry, the nation's largest asset class. HouseCanary is using its massive data set, world-class predictive analytics, and intuitive visualization tools to allow investors, lenders and other real estate professionals to accelerate decision-making in an industry slow to transform because of fragmented and incomplete data.

"We are on a mission to help people make better real estate decisions," said Jeremy Sicklick, CEO and co-founder of HouseCanary. "We want to do for residential real estate what Bloomberg did for financial services – build a platform that will be a beacon of accuracy and transparency, enabling greater speed and confidence in residential real estate transactions."

DISRUPTING THE REAL ESTATE MARKET

Inaccurate real estate valuations played a significant role in the financial collapse of 2008. Before the recession, millions of homes were purchased, loans were made and mortgage-backed securities were issued at irrational valuations.  These legacy real estate processes had been largely driven by intuition and augmented by incomplete, expensive and error-prone data, even at the most sophisticated institutions.

HouseCanary set out to change the paradigm by applying an exhaustive approach to ingesting, scrubbing, organizing and analyzing data on 100 million U.S. residential properties in an effort to create a single source of reliable, accurate insight.  The result is the most comprehensive residential data set in the industry, combining sophisticated data architecture, advanced modeling, predictive analytics and machine learning to set a new standard in residential property valuation and forecasting accuracy.

Real estate investor Blackstone Invitation Homes, Sotheby's International Realty and the top three mortgage lenders are among the wide range of companies using HouseCanary analytical products to make better decisions and provide the same advantage to their clients.  HouseCanary's customers span institutional investors seeking properties to fit their investment criteria, lenders looking to identify prime mortgage prospects, and real estate brokerage firms looking to build advisory relationships with their clients.

"People are incredibly frustrated with not being able to price homes correctly," said Mark Dyne, chairman of ECA Ventures and one of the original investors in Skype. "HouseCanary will enable investors, lenders, realtors and even homeowners to understand everything there is to know about a property and make investment decisions in seconds – and at a fraction of the cost. This company has all the ingredients to disrupt a multi-trillion-dollar asset class."

Leading the team at HouseCanary are CEO Jeremy Sicklick and the company's Chief Scientist, Chris Stroud. Prior to HouseCanary, Sicklick was a partner and managing director at The Boston Consulting Group. Following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007, he was tapped to value real estate assets for several developers and private equity clients. He soon discovered that the industry lacked any real standard for valuing properties. He partnered with Stroud, an economist and statistician who was writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Dynamic Models of Financial Risk at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Stroud delayed his Ph.D. to help Sicklick co-found HouseCanary three years ago.

"Data is behind virtually every significant industry transformation," Stroud said. "By systematically gathering and analyzing terabytes of data from every county in the United States and some 10 million U.S. Census blocks, HouseCanary has set itself up to be the trusted source for residential real estate information now and into the future."

ABOUT HOUSECANARY

Founded in 2014, HouseCanary's mission is to help people make better real estate decisions. Built on a foundation of great data, powerful models and predictive analytics, the HouseCanary platform aggregates millions of data elements, including more than four decades of property data and a rapidly expanding arsenal of proprietary data calculations and analytics, to accurately define and forecast values and market influences. HouseCanary is financed by a $33 million Series A. Its notable investors include Hillspire (Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt's family office), Alpha Edison, ECA Ventures, Raven Ventures and others top investors including Egon Durban and Nikesh Arora. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. For more information, visit www.housecanary.com.

SOURCE HouseCanary

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http://www.housecanary.com