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4 | TH E M R EP O RT MTECH Housing Tech Entrepreneurs to Help Home Sellers A NEW PLATFORM INCLUDES A COMPARISON ENGINE AND EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES TO EMPOWER HOME SELLERS. R eal estate technology entrepreneurs including the founders of Ten-X, Auction.com, LendingTree, Realtor. com, Fizber, and Money360 have announced the launch of an educational resource and proprietary recommendation engine for homeowners, SOLD.com. The Irvine, California-based company will allow consumers to compare dozens of home-selling options so they can decide which approach and resources will enable them to sell for the highest prices in the shortest time while minimizing fees. The engine is completely free for consumers. "Selling a home is one of the biggest financial—and often, most emotional—decisions people make, and because it may only happen once or twice during a lifetime, it's not something that becomes sec- ond nature over time," said Matt Woods, President of SOLD.com. "SOLD.com is committed to help- ing homeowners understand all of the options available to them for selling their homes while protect- ing their valuable equity, and will serve as a trusted, unbiased resource throughout the home- selling process." The platform's recommendation engine is powered by machine learning that considers thousands of data points for individual properties, local markets, and individual seller preferences. Users are asked a few simple questions about their home and their top objectives during the sales process. SOLD.com's proprietary technology then evaluates the top local real estate agents, institutional buyers, discount agent models, and more to match the seller with the option that will best help them achieve their goals. The platform also provides a personal concierge to assist the homeowner through their selling experience. The company's board members include Jeff Frieden, co-founder and Chairman of Auction.com and Ten-X; Evan Gentry, founder and CEO of Money360, Inc. and Fizber; and Steve Ozonian, Lead Director for LendingTree and former CEO of Realtor.com. A New Tool From Black Knight THE NEW PLATFORM WILL WORK WITH LENDERS TO PRO- VIDE BIG DATA AND COMPLEX ANALYTICS FOR MORTGAGE AND HOUSING. J acksonville, Florida-head- quartered Black Knight, Inc. has announced the launch of its Rapid Analytics Platform (RAP), an innovative, interac- tive virtual analytics lab where users can source and upload data, execute queries, perform complex analytics, and train machine-learning models in a single workspace. A completely cloud-based platform for working with big data, RAP features an advanced workspace environ- ment offering a mix of traditional analytics, machine learning, and neural networks to help users create data-driven solutions and actionable analytic outputs. "RAP is a unique technology platform that was designed for the mortgage and capital markets industries and can be used out of the box, on day one, to support virtually endless possibilities," said Anthony Jabbour, CEO of Black Knight. "This innovative tool delivers computational power an order of magnitude greater than what most firms have in-house, and enables data scientists and analysts to deliver faster insights and help their companies enhance performance, identify new revenue opportunities, increase efficiencies, and reduce risk." The platform provides users with access to all of Black Knight's data assets, advanced analytics, and pre-built queries and analytic models, while also allowing them to join their own data to tailor queries and models to support specific use cases. Black Knight said that RAP's real-time, high-speed processing delivers instant results—even for the most complex uses—transforming the way mortgage industry and capital markets professionals work with large data sets and advanced analytics. Black Knight assets available via RAP currently include nation- wide assessor data, recorder data, Leveraging Tech to Strengthen the Industry From online educational resources to leveraging big data, here are the tech stories defining the industry landscape.