The housing inventory may be wearing thin, but there's still an abundance of distressed homeowners with properties up for grabs.
In some cases, these homeowners are desperate to sell: they just don't know it yet.
In order to capture this hidden market, RealtyTrac Networkpremiered its new Seller LeadTrac application, which screens and sorts through millions of properties nationwide to identify homeowners who may be willing to sell.
The application gives brokers the ability to look at all the characteristics of a property in distress and figure out if that house can be sold, noted Lisa Mackey, senior vice president with RealtyTrac. The application merges six databases which cover everything from public records, tax data, distressed property statistics, bankruptcy filings, for-sale listings, postal records and automated valuation models.
"We are in a real estate cycle where there is less inventory, and there are more buyers than there is inventory," Mackey explained.
So far, the company has identified more than 800,000 properties not presently listed for sale that are likely to be sold, simply by identifying motivated homeowners who have reason to escape their mortgage debt.
"When you realize that these properties are owned by homeowners who have defaulted on their mortgages and are extremely motivated sellers you begin to understand the value of Seller LeadTrac," RealtyTrac CEO Jamie Moyle said.
"We see a lot of growth potential with the product because this provides a way for them to create inventory when there is no inventory, and proactively go out and find people to get that inventory," concluded Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.
