Real estate investors who use HomeUnion can now see the sales prices and rental rates of properties comparable to each home the startup makes available for purchase.
HomeUnion is a company out to make buying and selling single-family rental homes as easy as trading stocks. The addition of comp data marks the latest improvement to its platform, which represents one of the only service models that provides an end-to-end homebuying and selling experience.
HomeUnion curates properties it thinks will yield generous returns, lets investors buy those properties from afar with the option to use financing provided by HomeUnion, and handles rent collection and upkeep on investors’ behalf.
The company employs salaried real estate agents to find and bid on properties for investors in more than 10 markets.
Users traditionally have had to trust that HomeUnion is doing a good job of cherry-picking listings likely to deliver the best returns in their markets.
The comparable properties and rents data, along with other information HomeUnion has recently added to its listings, can help contextualize and validate the single-family property listings curated by the company.
“By providing both purchase and rent comps online, we give our remote investors a better view of both the earning potential of a property and the market where the house is located,” said Don Ganguly, founder and CEO of HomeUnion, in a statement.
“This, in turn, gives them the confidence that the projected returns are sound and that the property is indeed a solid investment,” he added.
HomeUnion is part of a crop of companies crafting systems that have remained frustratingly out of reach for years: end-to-end platforms that shepherd buyers through the entire homebuying and seller process.
HomeUnion didn’t immediately respond when asked if it’s considering opening up its transaction platform to consumers.
But given the infrastructure of HomeUnion’s platform, which includes a financing component, it’s not hard to imagine that HomeUnion might eventually begin targeting consumers.
Two other real estate transaction platforms that primarily served investors in the past, Auction.com and Hubzu, have already begun to head down that road.