TheMReport

20 | TH E M R EP O RT SPONSORED CON- EXECUTIVE PROFILE: CHRIS STROUD A NATURAL PROGRESSION W hen Chris Stroud was obtaining his mas- ter's degree from UC Santa Barbara, he did not imagine he would be forecasting housing market trends for a living. But when his background in statistics and research met up with the real estate market, it seemed like a natural fit. Stroud received hands-on experience with eco- nomic and statistical modeling while working for a firm in Southern California whose specialty was housing—although the firm looked at overall local economies in the SoCal area, the majority of the firm's clients were housing-related. "I was familiar with all that data and fairly familiar with housing markets, although my actual passion and what I was doing research on, was all related to financial research and essentially predicting where stock prices are headed," Stroud said. "(It was a) [p]retty natural jump into housing as I had been exposed to it. It wasn't my first and foremost passion at the time. I was familiar there." That familiarity eventually led Stroud to a whole new sector of economics. Knowing that he would not be staying in California long- term due to the high cost of living, Stroud moved to Texas, where he began working toward a PhD at the University of San Antonio. Stroud was doing consulting work for the university, which included a project in which he forecasted where house prices in the U.S. would be in two to three years. While doing consulting work at the university, Stroud met his eventual entrepreneurial partner, Jeremy Sicklick, who had come across the university's consulting department and was looking to build forecast models for the housing crisis in 381 U.S. metropolitan areas. Stroud noticed a correlation between his passion—predict- ing stock prices—fit in with Sicklick's vision for a housing forecast model. "All the data that Jeremy was interested to find out, there was relationships for things like starts," Stroud said. "All the things he would see quoted in the Wall Street Journal and how they suppos- edly affect housing prices." Stroud continued, "Through that I built the models that worked quite well. He decided to expand the scope of the project to see if we could essentially replicate the success down to the zip code level. I put that together as well." Technology along with their forecast model worked essentially the same at the zip code level as it did at the metro level, Stroud said, and it was about a six to 12 month process to build the forecast model at the zip code level. To build on the success of that fore- casting model, Sicklick decided to strike it out on his own—and he needed a partner. From there, HouseCanary was born. Sicklick, the CEO of HouseCanary, said of the company's co- founder, "I think Chris is a true genius. He is a very clear thinker. He does amazing work around taking very complex topics and immense amounts of data, and getting down to what a forecast looks like, and what a value looks like, and actually why that is and being able to explain it. He's an amazing communicator, super-great intuition which just leads to phenomenal decisions." COVER STORY

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