HomeUnion has added detailed neighborhood information to its website that’s intended to give individual investors the confidence to look beyond their own backyards for single-family homes that might make good investments.
Launched last May, HomeUnion says it’s out to level the playing field for smaller investors, helping them compete with institutional giants to identify bargain-priced single-family rental properties in 15 markets around the country, and buy and manage them from afar.
HomeUnion says it can provide investors with analytical tools and on-the-ground “eyes” to perform property-level due diligence, with the option of managing properties remotely. The company acts as a broker in each of its markets, employing salaried real estate agents to find and bid on properties on behalf of clients.
Providing neighborhood-specific information like the affordability of rents based on income, the breakdown between homeowners and renters, age distributions and education levels, school metrics and average commute times gives investors insights into what a neighborhood is really like, HomeUnion founder and CEO Don Ganguly said in a statement.
At the retail level, single-family residential investing “has been constrained by a lack of information and by the need for proximity,” Ganguly said. “For the most part, individual investors were only comfortable buying properties in nearby neighborhoods that they knew and that were close enough to manage on a ‘hands-on basis.'”