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DS News May 2022

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56 desire. We're also looking to expand our reach to new customers. We've continued to maintain strong relationships with real estate investors and expanded to focus on independent mortgage brokers. Now, we're seeking to leverage additional opportunities to work with our colleagues at other Finance of America businesses and help existing Finance of America customers pursue real estate investments. For the industry at large, I think we will continue to see growth given the strong housing fundamentals, but as we have already seen, the growth will not accelerate at the same levels we've seen over the past few years. SFR will remain a target for investors with the pace of renter growth expected to double that of homeowner growth from 2020-2040. From a macro level, to meet this huge demand, we will need to increase the supply of housing. Multifamily and residential permits appear on pace to keep up with demand and should see substantial growth through 2024. Scarcity will be a big driver in SFR as tight inventory and supplies continue to push consolidation and institutional involvement in the industry. We expect that SFR operators will utilize efficiencies from consolidation in a similar way that national builders have in recent years to gain entry to new markets and optimize operational costs in a tightening market. MICHAEL JANSTA CMO Altisource Michael Jansta serves as Chief Marketing Officer of Altisource. Previously, he led the marketing team of the online real estate auction platform Hubzu. com, a business unit of Altisource. Since 2006, Jansta has facilitated over $45 billion in closed sales by bringing sellers and buyers together in residential and commercial real estate auctions. His passion is creating data- supported technology solutions to better market and enable transparency in real estate transactions. What can you tell us about the current state of the SFR marketplace? e market is strong for SFR. ere's so much demand, especially for investors who are willing to look around the corner and outside their markets, or even outside their traditional markets. Some of these markets, there just isn't a lot of inventory or opportunity, but that doesn't mean that the market's dried up. ere are places all over the country and that's where data comes into play. e headwinds I see are tied to inventory in those markets, but also price appreciation everywhere. Prices have been going up everywhere, but so have rents. And interest rates have climbed up, but they're not that high yet. e first house I bought in 2000 was at an 8.25% interest rate. My parents, when they bought their house in 1972, it was 12.5% interest rate. Now, the price point was $26,000, but the economy of scale was a lot different at that point. But when you look at the data, when you look at prices, and in certain markets and the rents that are for following them, there's so much growth in the South, the Southeast, and parts of the Midwest. Altisource isn't just looking at the MLS data and market data that's provided by the government. We also look at proprietary sources like rent range data, which is one of our business units that tracks rent information and what's happening in these markets dynamically, day-to-day. You see which markets have inventory that is coming into play. How is tech transforming SFR in 2022? I hate to use the phrase "democratization of data," but there are so many data sources right now, and the data's getting cheaper and cheaper. We aggregate 20 or 30 massive databases into the calculators that are on Equator.com, so an investor can just go right in, look at a property, and say, "Is this a good investment as a single-family rental?" We pre-populate those calculators with valuation information, rent information, and tax information. at's an enormous amount of data and valuable data that's just out there for free, for an investor to use on Equator.com. We provide that because we have the agent network that can help those investors acquire properties. at just wasn't the case in the past. You'd be able to find what was on the market or what was not on the market, or you'd find some photos and some property DNA, and that was it. Now, we're able to provide so much more so that you can feel more comfortable expanding geographically. at ability to have real estate properties, even as a mom-and-pop investor, in other states, you're able to do that because of FaceTime, because of all the data at your fingertips, property management companies, all the contractors, and the transparency that comes with these platforms. It opens the opportunity for investors to create portfolios, or even just acquire single properties in other states. You get better economies of scale if you have multiple properties and a team that's managing them, but we do have a lot of investors that buy one or two properties a year, and they're still able to do it in today's market with prices up and interest rates up. It really comes down to, "How do you find all those needles in the haystack to make a needle stack?" CAMERON PAINE VP House Canary As a top executive with two national brokerages, one of the largest MLSs in the country, and with Apartments.com, Cameron Paine's expertise encompasses the essential elements of organized real estate. Paine has also served on the Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com advisory boards. In 2014, Paine founded the Broker Public Portal, the national broker and MLS collaboration. After spending several years in Florida heading up the Bonita Springs-Estero Association of Realtors, in 2006 Paine was recruited to be the founding CEO of the Connecticut MLS. In 2017, he engineered the merger to create SmartMLS, one of the top 20 largest MLSs in the U.S. What can you tell us about the current state of the SFR marketplace? Everything we are seeing looks like 2022 is going to be at least as good as 2021, which was a record year in terms of SFR construction. Almost 14,000 units were built specifically to rent. It's double 2021's numbers, and it's almost triple what was done in the space between 2016 and 2020. So, we feel like 2022 is positioned really well. Any of the headwinds that might be out there—for Cover Story By: David Wharton

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