The “We Buy Ugly Houses” Company Makes Its First-Ever Acquisition, a Software Platform that Facilitates Identification of On-Market Properties in MLS

DALLAS: #dallas--HomeVestors® has acquired BlueSquIDX℠, a software platform that has facilitated more than $500 million in single-family home purchases, marking the company’s first-ever acquisition. The move continues HomeVestors’ three-decade record of pioneering professional real estate investing and the house-flipping industry, creating a way for its independently owned and operated franchises to better harness MLS (Multiple Listing Service) to search for and make offers on homes.

“We recognized an opportunity with on-market homes, which our franchisees haven’t traditionally pursued on MLS given the amount of time required to find and ‘work’ them,” said Brandon Gebers, Chief Growth Officer for HomeVestors. “Historically, only three percent of homes our franchisees purchase were on MLS in the previous 90 days, even as data shows 30 percent of flipped homes were listed in the same time period. However, scouring MLS can be a clunky and time-consuming process, so we bought a platform that is a virtual ‘easy’ button for our homebuyers.”

Searching for investment properties on MLS requires access to the service, an understanding of how best to use filters on the right terms, due diligence to find non-retail listings, and ultimately, a significant amount of time to weed through the data. BlueSquIDX has access to MLS data, which the company’s founder, Steve Peterson, then took through a machine learning process to identify the characteristics of properties that are flippable or that an investor would purchase.

“An investor might have a way to identify houses they want to offer on, but they then have to take the time to actually make those offers, and for each property, that requires getting a hold of a buying agent, writing a contract, sending it to the listing agent, and following up on it,” added Gebers. “BlueSquIDX shortens that evaluation and contracting period down to about five minutes with an evaluation and a single click.”

It typically takes about two hours to find, evaluate and make offers on an individual property. Before, franchisees needed to make roughly 50 offers to get a deal, but during HomeVestors’ BlueSquIDX pilot, the process was cut from what might have been 100 hours to only about four to get a deal. BlueSquIDX’s Peterson is staying on with HomeVestors to facilitate training, and will continue customizing and enhancing the platform to support more than 750 franchisees across 47 states in expanding their focus beyond off-market opportunities.

“This is the kind of tool the typical fix-and-flipper doesn’t have access to,” said Josh Waltzer, Chief Executive Officer of HomeVestors. “It fundamentally changes how franchisees operate – those with access will have deals pushed to them every day, and all they have to do is evaluate the property, click a button and enter ‘here's what I'd offer.’”

About HomeVestors of America, Inc.

For 30 years, HomeVestors® has recruited, trained and supported its more than 750 independently owned and operated HomeVestors franchisees that specialize in building businesses based on buying, rehabbing, selling, and holding residential properties. The largest professional house buying franchise in the U.S. with more than 160,000 houses bought since 1996, HomeVestors is known as the We Buy Ugly Houses® people, and strives to make a positive impact in each of the 47 states and the District of Columbia, in which it has franchises.

Fonte: Business Wire