Housefolios saves six-figures with REAPI

Housefolios is a residential real estate analysis platform that enables investors to evaluate opportunities with red-light, green-light simplicity. Beneath the intuitive UI is a powerful data crunching engine that chews through enormous amounts of market data to formulate its recommendations. In order to execute their ambitious plan, the company needed access to nationwide property data, including historical transactions.

The Challenge

In order to build a recommendation engine that the masses will find useful you first have to have enough data to conduct the underlying analysis. This is the conundrum Housefolios faced.

They’d been told that the only way to access nationwide property data was to buy a dataset from one of the large data aggregators. But the cost was exorbitant, more than $250k. Not only that, they soon learned that they’d need to hire a full-time engineer just to process and manage the raw data this big box data company was delivering. Between the personnel and added infrastructure cost, that was an additional $10k a month. CTO, Jared Rossean explains, “We were forced to grow faster than we were able to [in order to justify the massive expense]”.

REAPI’s Solution

REAPI gave Housefolios the experience of having their own data warehouse–without the hassle and hefty expense normally required. Using our Property Search and Property Details APIs, the company was able to parse the data as finely as they needed to conduct their analysis. Every data point was served via convenient RESTful APIs.

Results

The company was able to transition off the bulk data license from the old school data aggregator. Since REAPI pricing is usage based, they are now able to grow their business at a pace that is in line with their broader strategy rather than feeling forced to grow too quickly just to afford their data. Their data procurement bill is a fraction of the previous amount, and they were able to re-deploy an engineer to work on another component of the platform.