Altisource Portfolio Solutions, the owner of online real estate auction platform Hubzu and for-sale-by-owner search site Owners.com, has launched a cooperative designed to deliver “savings and efficiencies” to a range of real estate investors.
“Residential Investor One” lets investors, from “fix and flippers” to institutional investors, access discounts on products and services needed to purchase, renovate, manage and sell residential investment properties, according to Altisource.
The real estate technology services provider has modeled the cooperative for real estate investors partly after the two mortgage banking cooperatives, Lenders One and Wholesale One, that Altisource has already built, according to David Wisen, senior vice president of cooperatives and origination services.
Services offered by Residential Investor One will include:
- Access to capital for renovating and acquiring properties.
- Reduced rehabilitation and maintenance costs and discounts on products and services such as flooring, paint, appliances, office supplies, technology and shipping.
- Outsourced property management services.
- Reduced transaction costs for buying and selling homes.
- A “community peer group” for networking and sharing best practices.
Over the last two years, Hubzu.com, which claims to have facilitated over 100,000 property sales, has grown from an auction platform for real estate owned (REO) properties serving only lenders and investors into one that accommodates a wider range of players involved in home sales, like real estate agents and consumers.
In acquiring Owners.com in December 2014, Altisource signaled a desire to continue to cater more to consumers.
Integrating Hubzu.com’s auction platform with Owners.com in some manner seems a likely way Altisource may accomplish this. Such integration would allow homeowners to put their properties up for auction online, in addition to listing them on the multiple listing service, a service currently offered by Owners.com.
Altisource told Inman in December that, in the future, it might evaluate integrating Hubzu.com and Owners.com into one site.
Altisource’s launch of Residential Investor One marks the firm’s latest bid to expand its footprint in residential real estate. In August, Altisource purchased loan servicer software provider Equator for $70 million.