Buying and selling a home is stressful. For instance, sellers may find a home they love, only to realize that they won’t be able to make a competitive offer unless they sell their existing property first. Then, once they put their home on the market, getting moving timelines to match up can be impossible. Fortunately, Orchard provides buyers and sellers with a stress-free alternative to the traditional real estate process. Here’s how they’re working closely with ATTOM to make it all happen.
Removing Uncertainty from the Buying and Selling Timeline
In today’s market, buying and selling a home is no small feat. Although sellers typically have their pick of competitive offers, once they’re under contract, the hard work begins if they are also looking for their next home. Suddenly, they’re a buyer competing for properties in a low-inventory market. At that point, finding the right property can take a lot longer than expected.
“In this market, the timeline for buying and selling a home typically doesn’t line up,” explains Greg Svigruha, the Lead Data Engineer for Orchard. “[Sellers] may need to invest in short-term housing or storage solutions, which costs them money that they shouldn’t have to spend.”
For their part, Orchard is working to remove a lot of the ambiguity from this process. Their Move First program allows customers to make non-contingent offers on homes that they love and unlock their equity right away to make an offer. Then, once they’ve moved into the new home, the company will work with them to prep their old home for resale and put it on the market, all for a cost that is similar to a typical real estate commission. Buyers skip all home showings and get to spend the energy on nesting in their new digs.
Best of all, Orchard guarantees that the home will sell. If a property sits on the market for over 120 days without receiving any offers, they will buy the home for an agreed-upon price. However, it’s worth noting that this option rarely needs to be used. The company boasts that 97% of homes sell for above the guaranteed offer amount before that contingency goes into effect.
Utilizing ATTOM to Power Business Processes
Yet, before the team at Orchard can make a guaranteed offer on a property or extend the funds to allow their customers to buy new homes, they first need to know how much each property is worth in the current market.
For that, they’ve turned ATTOM. They’re leveraging tax data from ATTOM in conjunction with local MLS data and proprietary research to fuel their automated valuation model (AVM), which provides their foundation for determining value.
“Our underwriting is dependent on our pricing algorithm,” says Svigruha. “All of our businesses use it in their work and our sellers even see it on their dashboard when they sign up with us.”
Even that sign-up process is made smoother by ATTOM’s real estate data. According to Svigruha, once an interested seller puts their address into Orchard’s intake form, the majority of information about the property is automatically filled in with tax data. The seller is only responsible for confirming the information, which makes the whole process much quicker and easier.
“We looked at where people were dropping off and found that automating the intake form made a huge difference. If a customer sees ten questions and nine are already filled in, that’s much more manageable than ten empty fields that they have to figure out on their own,” explains Svigruha.
Expanding their Reach with Ease Alongside ATTOM
Currently, Orchard operates in 13 distinct markets. Their services are available in Atlanta, GA
Austin, TX, Charlotte, NC, Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, Denver, CO, Houston, TX. Montgomery County, MD, Northern Virginia, Phoenix, AZ, Portland, OR, Raleigh-Durham, NC, San Antonio, TX, and Seattle, WA.
For the time being, they are taking things one city at a time, and with each expansion, they are leaning on ATTOM to help them scale with ease.
As the Lead Data Engineer, Svigruha is able to speak to how ATTOM is able to help them overcome some of the hurdles that come with starting somewhere new:
“Whenever we launch in a new market, getting the tax data is literally the easiest thing about the process,” he admits. “Once the new contract is signed, the new data is sent over in about a week. By contrast, integrating with a new MLS system usually takes about two months to access the data, build out the fields, and understand all of the definitions.”
In the future, the company hopes to expand nationwide. On his end, Svigruha is relieved to know that ATTOM has the capacity to be by their side the entire way.
“We chose [ATTOM] because they offer national level tax data,” he says. “It made them the smart option.”
