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Partnerships in the proptech space are common. Niche solutions can find traction with enterprise-sized platforms and the latter can sell benefits in which they don’t excel or currently offer.
Integrations are a smart tactic for scaling, marketing, and in general, industry growth.
The latest two firms rubbing code are property data and analytics company Plunk and Milestones, a homeownership management platform, according to a May 16 announcement sent to Inman. Specifically, Milestones has integrated Plunk’s Remodel Value and Project Recommendations.
The overlap makes sense, as part of Plunk’s core competency is comparing home values to remodeling investments, letting buyers, sellers and in this case, homeowners know what a home update could mean for resale value. Milestones helps owners manage and predict ownership expenses and oversee ongoing home commitments.
“Milestones has built a unique way for real estate professionals to stay highly engaged with clients across the entire homeownership journey,“ David Bluhm, president and co-founder of Plunk, said in the announcement.“Now clients can easily gain access to real-time valuation and remodel analysis regarding their largest investment.”
Plunk’s mobile, dynamic value analytics software actively integrates live market data, covering 104 million homes, with a range of prospective upgrade projects to arrive at a potential future value. Users-agents, vendors and homeowners — are given a dashboard of comparison tools, such as charts, a proprietary scoring algorithm and other metrics to better understand how a home would fare on the open market.
Internal research by Plunk revealed that “$289 billion in property value, an average of $240,000 per home, had yet to be
unlocked through home renovations across the 1.1 million Seattle-area homes analyzed,” the release stated.
The company released its API (application programming interface) in early 2023 specifically to help it plug-in to colleagues in the industry.
DropOffer, Calque and SphereBuilder use Plunk’s Market Insights API to share dynamic real estate industry data with their users and to augment product offerings.
Renovations can become an alternative to moving for many American homeowners as limited inventory and especially higher interest rates leave people with little reason to put homes on the market. Prices are also increasing.
Milestones made what could be considered a surprise entrance into the real estate space, operating in stealth mode for three years before leaving the nest plump with $10 million in Series A funding. It also hatched into a category of proptech largely bereft of innovation or widescale adoption but is seeking to change how software helps homeowners remain connected to their assets.
While on paper its competitors are many, MoveEasy and CORE Home remain its most prominent peers.
Milestones Founder and CEO Dustin Gray said at the time that Milestones was “the first technology firm to deliver a homeownership portal similar to consumer offerings for managing healthcare, personal finance, and education.”
Maintaining close contact after closing is a major challenge for industry practitioners. Years of homeownership create new relationships for clients and unseen marketing challenges for agents. Friends become agents, agents move brokerages and alliances shift.
The National Association of Realtors’ Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers found that 75 percent of buyers would use their agents again or recommend their agents to others, yet only a little over half, 53 percent, actually do.
Partnerships with fellow proptechs might help agents bump up their repeat business.
“With Plunk, we are able to empower homeowners with data-driven financial guidance to increase the values of their homes over time,” Gray said in a statement. “Plunk Remodel Value and Project Recommendations provide transparency into the best home improvement projects that can increase a home’s value and help clients reach their home’s maximum potential worth.”
