What if you could accurately predict the resale value of a home before buying it? A startup called HouseCanary claims that its data can help you with that.
Touting a system that can forecast a sale price within 2.5%, co-founder and CEO Jeremy Sicklick told TechCrunch that Eric Schmidt, Kobe Bryant and other well-known names are betting on his startup because they believe it will make real estate investors money.
HouseCanary’s latest round is $31 million in Series B funding led by PSP Growth, a division of the investment firm founded by former Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. It includes existing investors and follows a $33 million a Series A round announced earlier this year.
Estimating the U.S. residential real estate market to be $30 trillion in size, Sicklick says that HouseCanary’s business revolves around selling software to appraisers and real estate investment firms. His group negotiates licensing deals for the data.
HouseCanary’s technology is “able to forecast and understand what’s happening with home prices at a very local level,” says Sicklick. “We understand how prices are changing across 4 million blocks.”
Penny Pritzker, said in a note to TechCrunch that she invested because “HouseCanary’s tech solves a problem that’s everywhere in real estate: a lack of quality information that you can use to make accurate forecasts. Investors miss real opportunities because they don’t have the data to identify or model them.”
The San Francisco-based startup was founded in 2014 and plans to use the capital to invest in research and development. It will also be expanding its 100-person team to add more sales and marketing employees.