SmartZip Analyzes Real Estate Market

By Zoe Francis, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

Company Targets Real Estate & Lending Industries

The experts at SmartZip Analytics may know when you are ready to sell your house even before you put it on the market.

SmartZip analyzes reams of data from multiple sources to help real estate and loan specialists stay on top of their markets.

"SmartZip is a technology company that helps businesses in the real estate and lending industries acquire more customers through highly targeted marketing using big data and analytics," Avi Gupta, CEO and president, said.

SmartZip was founded in 2009 when Gupta and the other founding partners came up with the idea of building an investment rating for homes.

"The idea germinated at the worst time in the real estate industry when the whole subprime mortgage crisis was at its peak," Gupta recalled. "We were looking for ways to help customers get more confidence in the homes they were buying. That was intended for the consumer and also for lenders, banks and mortgage companies."

Once that product was developed, the company's focus turned toward real estate and lending specialists instead of targeting consumers.

"We were leveraging our expertise in real estate analytics, but applying that to a different problem," he said. "We license a lot of raw data from over a dozen different sources. Our expertise is building actionable analytics on top of it."

SmartZip gathers seemingly endless amounts of data about homes, loans, people, communities, schools, crime, job statistics, climate, environmental factors and more.

"Our proprietary algorithms take all this information in and analyze what a property in a given neighborhood might be worth today," Gupta said. "We sell primarily to real estate companies and agents and lenders. They license our analytics to help grow their business. Many leading consumer real estate sites also license from us."

A person looking to buy or sell a home may not even realize the valuable information they are getting is powered by SmartZip.

"It could be branded with one of our clients," he said. "(Consumers) may not know it's coming from us, but it's all SmartZip in the background."

The feature that sets SmartZip apart from competitors is its uncanny ability to target people who may soon want to sell their home.

"I do believe that we are the only ones that help agents and brokers get home sellers," Gupta said. "Most of the solutions out there like Zillow and Trulia attract mostly home buyers. We are very unique in that we help our customers get home sellers. That's a key differentiator for us. We help them get customers on the sell side versus the buy side."

While targeting home buyers is important, it is more beneficial for real estate agents and companies to target the sellers.

"When they get a seller, there's a multiplicative effect," he explained. "They get so much mileage from that. Their name is out there in the Internet world, on Facebook and in the real world on lawns. Many sellers end up buying a home, too. Either they move to a different neighborhood or get a better house, so the agent could potentially get two deals in one."

SmartZip's business is growing so rapidly that the company is moving this month from its headquarters near Stoneridge mall to a bigger location at Rosewood Commons in Hacienda.

"We are bursting at the seams in our current location," Gupta said. "We have two floors at 10,000 square feet each. One reason (we're moving) was to accommodate today's and future growth. The other reason was to get everybody onto one floor to keep the company cohesive."

The new site has 36,000 square feet of space on one floor.

"We are very excited about the move," he said. "The company is looking forward to all being on the same floor. This new space will give us sufficient room to grow, at least into the next year."

SmartZip continues to expand its services, including a program that allows lenders to identify people who are likely to move so that lenders can maintain current clients and capture new ones.

"We are leveraging our recent round of venture financing to further grow in the real estate space with new products and solutions," Gupta said. "We are also starting to expand in the mortgage and lending industry with similar products."

Learn more about SmartZip Analytics at smartzip.com.

Photo: Avi Gupta, Ph.D., President and CEO, of SmartZip

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