WAV Group’s involvement in the venture capital community allows us to meet a great amount of smart and dedicated entrepreneurs who reimagine real estate. Two of those people are Brian Lent and David Bluhm, Co-founders of Plunk – and the wonderful team that they have assembled. In 2021, Plunk was among eight companies selected for the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION of REALTORS® REACH program, designed to facilitate critical conversations with forward-thinking real estate companies along with some venture capital.
When I met them, they shared their vision of developing a more accurate and dynamic analytics platform for real estate valuations. My first reaction is that they are crazy to go after the cornerstone of billion-dollar enterprises like CoreLogic, Black Knight Financial, and in some existential way – the consumer favorite – Zillow. Crazy is as crazy does I guess… Onward they charged.
Today, we can officially recognize that Plunk has accomplished so much. They reached their first, most important milestone. Plunk’s analytics are now available on over 104 million U.S. Homes, representing all U.S. Markets. It took five years of hard work and a lot of capital. You can now see Plunk’s Home Value, Home Ticker, and Market Insights live across the housing industry including online sites, agent products, brokerages, MLS Providers, and CRM solutions.
Now that they have seeded the usefulness of the Plunk products in instrumenting residential real estate values in key vertical markets, they will need to expand adoption. This should be an interesting year for Plunk, facing the headwind of many companies in the real estate industry who are trading innovation for cost savings. Gaining market share will be challenging, but talented people always seem to find a path.
If you are unfamiliar with Plunk’s home value, ticker, and market insights products – they are worth a look. I think that many of the broker website platforms and CMA tools would benefit from making Plunk available.
