Nextdoor’s partnership with HouseCanary will offer members new property valuation and appreciation toolsNextdoor
Nextdoor announced Tuesday a partnership with HouseCanary, a real estate data analytics company, to offer property valuation and comparison tools for its members.
Since last year, Nextdoor has been building out the Real Estate offering on its platform, where users can find information about properties on sale in their neighborhood. Now, the company’s partnership with HouseCanary will expand these offerings by equipping homeowners with predictive and evaluative data on how much their house is worth compared to properties in their vicinity.
“Since the beginning, a hot topic of conversation has always been the value of [members’] homes, the values of homes in their neighborhood, how that’s changing over time, and what that means,” said Nextdoor CRO Lauren Nemeth.
According to Nemeth, Nextdoor is in 85% of neighborhoods across America, and of that pool, the majority of members are homeowners. The platform is primarily used in the United States, but also has an overseas audience in Germany, France, United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, totalling up to 180,000 neighborhoods worldwide.
Nextdoor’s beefed up Real Estate section will provide data on both property purchases and rentals, as well as gives real estate agents a platform to promote their listings and talk to potential customers with verified home addresses. HouseCanary’s four decades-plus worth of real estate data will allow homeowners to make better decisions about their home valuations by giving access to market value data and three-year appreciation projections.
“It was a no brainer for us to partner with HouseCanary, who is a subject matter expert in terms of the valuations of homes and putting together those projections,” Nemeth said.
The company’s entry into home valuation will likely be competing with with rival Zillow’s Zestimate service.
Nextdoor was launched in 2011 in San Francisco as a social network platform where neighbors can privately talk about local happenings, exchange tips on service providers, and find lost pets. The site has gained notoriety as a tight-knit, honest, and sometimes funny forum where locals can auction off genuine Picasso paintings or gossip about which neighbor’s dog keeps on pooping in other people’s yards.
For Michael Brombacher, a real estate agent in Houston, Nextdoor has allowed him a powerful digital platform from which he can reach potential clients and promote his listings.
“I realized how powerful that could be, that everyone in my neighborhood or whichever zip code, they would see my picture,my phone number, and my name,” Brombacher said. “I don’t get too many phone calls, but I do have a seperate phone number for my Nextdoor ads, and when the phone does ring, it’s usually a super warm slash hot lead.”
Real estate agents can use Nextdoor’s Real Estate platform to promote open houses, post thought leadership articles, talk to neighborhood homeowners, and get their brands out there earlier in the sell-side funnel. Brombacher’s data from his Nextdoor sponsorship showed that 37,141 people saw his ads in the last 30 days in his selected zipcodes, with an average of 3 views per person at the cost of one cent per person.
Brombacher has been a member of Nextdoor since around 2014, and started paying for ads on Nextdoor ten months ago when he noticed another real estate agent’s listing appearing on his neighborhood’s Nextdoor feed. He said he spends around $550-600 a month to have his profile show up in 25 zip codes.
Brombacher said that he also advertised on Realtor.com and Facebook, but Nextdoor was currently the biggest portion of his budget.
“Everyone knows you can go advertise on Realtor.com, Zillow, Google and Facebook,” he said. “I think Nextdoor is a hidden gem right now–it’s a bit of a secret.”