AGENT, MORTGAGE AND LENDING
Knock | January 25, 2023
Knock, an innovative fintech company, announced on January 24, 2023, that agents and consumers would no longer have to choose between working with their local or national lenders.
The company informed that any lender or agent can now add a no-interest equity advance loan from Knock to almost any conventional or jumbo mortgage to increase the benefits of Knock Home SwapTM. In addition, homeowners can win their desired property and move on their timeline by matching Knock Home Swap Equity Advance with a purchase mortgage.
Knock Co-Founder and CEO Sean Black stated, "Since 2015, our mission has been to empower people to move freely, and we have continued to raise the bar when it comes to making the process of buying and selling homes simple, certain and cost-effective."
"Many companies offer home loans, but no one else offers the Home Swap. By partnering with lenders, we are making it easier for consumers to get the benefits of leveraging the equity in their current house to buy their dream home without any of the hassles that typically come with buying and selling, including the ability to avoid moving twice and living through repairs and showings," he added.
(Source – Cision PR Newswire)
Before putting their current house on the market, a homeowner can use Knock Home Swap Equity Advance to make a firm offer, negotiate, and close quickly on the home they want.
Knock Home Swap Equity Advance loan can also be used to make up to a 30% down payment, buy down the mortgage rate, cover closing expenses, cover up to $35,000 in home preparation costs to sell the old house for top cash, and pay up to six months of mortgage payments on the previous house. Besides, Knock's Home Prep & Marketability Allowance gives access to its approved contractor network and pays all bills out of homeowners' equity.
About Knock
Knock was started in 2015 by founding team members of Trulia.com. Since then, it has raised more than $600 million in debt and equity from top investors. National Association of Realtors® is a strategic investor in Knock through its investment arm, Second Century Ventures. This means that Knock's homeownership solutions can be sold to its clients by its 1.5 million members. The company currently operates 72 markets across the country but wishes to expand to 100 by 2023.
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BROKERAGE, INVESTMENTS
Avalara | February 24, 2023
On February 23, 2023, Avalara, a software development company dedicated to the real estate sector, announced the launch of its new digital business solution, Avalara Property Tax, for real and personal property tax management, enhancing tax compliance with cloud-based automation.
This solution would assist accounting and businesses professional in managing their complete property tax portfolio and compliance activities. In addition, it supports their activities like preparation of business personal property renditions, procession and handling of tax bills, assessments, and appeals.
There is a necessity for a more flexible and customizable solution for businesses, especially with in-house property tax compliance. Its solution helps the huge workloads with the SaaS facility of a secured central hub for property tax compliance operations over real and personal property. It facilitates the tax data like tax bills and assessments in the mail platform from various jurisdictions. It scans documents in a single secured platform with accuracy and automation to the selected account. In addition, it offers due date tracking, a feature created to avoid late payment penalties as it is difficult to assimilate due dates, discount opportunities, terms, and conditions separately.
EVP and GM of Indirect Tax, Avalara, Jayme Fishman, said, “Today, property tax is one of the most challenging business compliance activities. This challenge is due to the complexity of preparing personal property returns and the downstream implications of assessments and tax bills for real and personal property. Further complications arise from many jurisdictions having different due dates and terms, varying state depreciation schedules, and getting data out of client systems to feed into the process.” He added, “Our new property tax software solution follows our core mission of making taxes less taxing by offering businesses and accountants a more effective way to manage their property tax compliance and reduce errors while saving valuable time and money.”
(Source – Business Wire)
About Avalara
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Avalara, a cloud-based tax compliance solutions provider for businesses, offers sales tax automation and compliance services, tax return filing services, e-commerce integrations and exemption certificate management. Founded in 2004, it gives robust cloud-based solutions for tax compliance automation with efficiency and accuracy in real-time scenarios across the United States and worldwide. It delivers services for over 30,000 customers, and about 1,400 signed partner integrations for EPR, accounts, e-commerce, POS, CRM systems, and recurring bills of business applications. In addition, it supports tax transactions like sales, usability, excise, communication, lodging, VAT, GST, and indirect taxes.
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REAL ESTATE TECHNOLOGY, REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT
AppFolio | February 03, 2023
On February 2, 2023, AppFolio, Inc. introduced AppFolio AlphaTM, an AI-powered investment management solution meant to provide a unified experience that automatically gathers, standardizes, and displays crucial property management data.
The end goal of this innovation is to give real estate investment managers useful information that they can use to make better strategic decisions.
Manually aggregating property management data for business insights is time-consuming, difficult to manage, error-prone, and impossible to scale. According to a report by Pi Labs, nearly half of the organizations spend 2–3 months a year collecting and organizing data to make decisions. In today's economy, asset managers are more focused on maximizing their investments using measures like occupancy rates, lease expiration, and rent increases.
AppFolio Alpha is a cost-effective alternative to hiring more staff that makes it simple for asset managers to collect and consolidate data, view key metrics for optimizing asset performance, audit performance across multiple portfolios at a glance, generate accurate reports, and meet their objectives.
Nat Kunes, Senior Vice President of Real Estate Investment Management at AppFolio, stated, "Today's real estate investment managers deserve technology that keeps up with the fast pace of the broader real estate industry."
He continued, "AppFolio Alpha enables investment managers to spend less time sorting through scattered data sets and more time uncovering actionable insights with visual KPIs like occupancy rates and lease expirations. We're proud to continue bringing innovations like Alpha to the market so we can help customers better understand potential points of exposure and take action for their business."
(Source – GlobeNewswire)
About AppFolio
AppFolio, the industry's preeminent cloud-based business management solutions provider, specializes in serving the real estate sector. The company's products and services make it possible for its clients to digitally transform their companies, improve the efficiency of their most essential business processes, and provide superior service to their end users.
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