It’s been a big year at HouseCanary, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and to thank our customers, employees, and investors for helping us reach these milestones. Here’s a quick look at what we’ve accomplished in 2017 and what lies ahead for real estate and for HouseCanary.

Every human has more access to information today than we can possibly absorb — which makes it difficult to apply that information to everyday decisions. That’s why we spent 2017  creating the mosttrusted source for the $30 trillion U.S. residential real estate market, crafting products that crunch vast amounts of real estate data in order to best predict how an individual home will shift with the market, and distributing those products to the groups and people who can apply them most intelligently — our customers.

In addition to the massive flow of data, the real estate industry has been experiencing a changing regulatory landscape, which means homebuyers and sellers have experienced prolonged closing times, appraisal delays and cost escalation, and limited inventory while the industry adapts to these shifts. The overall consensus across all market participants is that something has to change in terms of transaction speed and cost — a problem HouseCanary is uniquely equipped to solve through our products and partnerships with real estate industry leaders. To focus on building out our product suite, we raised a $31 million series B funding round and opened a second engineering office in Boulder, Colorado.

In 2017, HouseCanary focused on building the highest-quality, most trusted source to value the $30 trillion US residential real estate marketplace. Here are some of our accomplishments toward this goal:

• HouseCanary launched a brand-new product: The Agile Appraisal™ empowers appraisers, lenders, and investors to generate property appraisals and valuations in significantly less time. By using data and technology to perform the heavy lifting, HouseCanary cut the time required for an appraisal from 20+ days to 5 days — bifurcating the process, cutting cost and time, while improving the quality and accuracy of the valuation.
• We achieved the most accurate nationwide automated valuations in the market, reducing our automated valuation model (AVM) error rate in half (from 5.3% in January to 2.7% today), while adding 9.2 million property valuations, to value 99 million homes constantly.
• We created the nation’s most accurate neighborhood home price index, with 3.6 million block-level home price indices and forecasts.
• We achieved the most accurate nationwide rental valuations in the market, reducing our error rate by half (from 7.1% in January to 3.5% today), while adding 17.6 million property valuations to value rents for 84 million homes.
• We launched our nationwide quarterly HouseCanary Rental Investment Index, the first of its kind to show rental investment return from coast to coast, ZIP by ZIP, block by block.

All of these efforts are giving real estate professionals the data insights they need to be certain that their real estate purchase was a solid financial decision and elevating the entire industry as a result.Looking back on this year, I feel immense pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish for our clients and the real estate industry at large. We look forward to the new partnerships and advances we have planned for 2018 as we continue to streamline and perfect the real estate valuation and transaction process — because this is just the beginning.