Nov 30, 2021

It could soon get easier for investors in single-family rental homes to acquire and liquidate individual properties or entire portfolios more efficiently using a one-stop online marketplace Altisource is creating with SFRhub.com. Since its 2018 launch, backers of SFRhub.com says the site has reviewed, underwritten or marketed nearly 200,000 single family rental homes, with an average inventory of $1 billion in single-family rental (SFR) and build-for-rent (BFR) listings available through the site. Under a memorandum of understanding announced Monday, Altisource will integrate data and services into the SFRhub.com marketplace to create a “collaborative, fully-integrated acquisition and disposition digital platform” to streamline transactions and provide services including listing, financing, title, inspection and property management. Altisource, an integrated service provider and marketplace for the real estate and mortgage industries, operates Hubzu , an online real estate auction platform, and Equator.com , a property search site that helps investors find, acquire, and manage single-family rental properties, foreclosures, and short sales. In addition, Altisource manages the Best Partners Mortgage Cooperative Inc., which does business as Lenders One . A national alliance of independent mortgage bankers, Lenders One counts more than 240 companies as members, including not only banks, credit unions, and independent mortgage banks, but real estate- and builder-affiliated firms, each originating between $50 million to $25 billion in mortgages annually. Altisource data and services to be integrated into SFRhub.com include rental data from RentRange , asset valuation data from Springhouse , auction services from Hubzu, closing and title services from Premium Title , and inspection and construction services . “We believe this multi-platform collaboration is truly one of the largest disruptions in the CRE [commercial real estate] industry,” said Jeff Cline, executive director and principal of SFRhub.com, in a statement . “Our goal is to offer [single-family residential] investors, whether buying or selling one or many homes in a larger bulk portfolio, a solution to expedite and simplify the investment process with technology and support so they can achieve their investment and management goals and compete with larger-scale investors.” SFRhub.com operator SFRhub Advisors is a national commercial real estate brokerage dedicated to single-family residential and build-for-rent investment portfolios of five or more homes. The company is an independently owned and operated franchise of SVN International Corp., a full-service commercial real estate franchisor of the SVN brand. Competitors include Houston-based rental homeownership startup Doorvest, which helps consumers buy and manage rental properties. Doorvest announced a $39 million funding round this month. Shares in Altisource’s Luxembourg-based holding company, Altisource Portfolio Solutions S.A., trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the symbol ASPS. In its most recent quarterly report to investors, Altisource reported an $18.3 million third quarter net loss, with revenue falling 51 percent from a year ago, to $43.2 million. Although the company ended the quarter with $230.7 million in debt, an Oct. 6 agreement to sell Altisource’s 69 percent equity interest in Pointillist Inc. was expected to generate $100 million in cash. A provider of customer journey analytics, Pointillist was created by Altisource in 2019. The sale of the company to Genesys Cloud Services Inc. was expected to close by the end of the year. Get Inman’s Extra Credit Newsletter delivered right to your inbox. A weekly roundup of all the biggest news in the world of mortgages and closings delivered every Wednesday. Click here to subscribe.