“This data is a gold!”
“We’ll package this up and sell it to Wall Street and make a fortune!”
“Just give us your data and you won’t have to pay a thing!”
“Big data! Big data! Big data!”
I’ve heard various versions of the above statements made many many times in this industry. But in all those years there doesn’t seem to be much to back it up.
Andrea Brambila at Inman News recently did an article on Analytics providers tracking most US home sales through MLSs
She highlights RPR and CoreLogic’s InfoNet. CoreLogic does put out some real numbers, they say that their revenue share split exceeded 1 million dollars last year. Which is decent, but not really living up to the hype.
And then there’s this gem.
“In May, NAR’s board of directors voted to dip into reserves to boost spending on RPR to $21.9 million a year for the next three years, partially in order to support the release of RPR mobile apps. Between 2009 and 2014, NAR spent a total $98.9 million on RPR, an amount that is projected to rise to $120.8 million by the end of 2015 and $142.7 million by the end of 2016.
In the four years since its launch, RPR has struggled to make money, generating a total of $586,270 in revenue from data analytics as of December 2013.”
Funny how you never see that info on the “Realtors Property Resource CEO Update”.
RPR spent $100 million, plus 20 million more per year committed. Wow, that is a breathtaking number. I think they must have hired the ObamaCare tech team. PS, That’s less than Zillow raised in venture capital before it neared IPO and created $4 billion+ in value. RPR, great data and ideas, but no private co would need to spend like that to create those products – a good start-up could do it for 10% of that, and exceed the revenue. I’m going to re-activate my license just to access that data before RPR goes RIP.