Databricks helps more Hometrack customers say… Yes!

Hometrack, the leading provider of portfolio insight and AVMs to the UK property market, is using Databricks’ Lakehouse platform to scale its existing business and to fuel expansion into new markets.  

Founded in 1999, Hometrack, which is part of Zoopla, is the pioneer behind the market-leading Automated Valuation Model (AVM), which is used by 17 of the top 20 mortgage lenders to produce remote valuations.  Amidst a booming property market, Hometrack is increasing its collaboration with customers and prospects to help them navigate changing market dynamics. Its focus on continual innovation brings mutual benefits to the lenders and also its customers and, by partnering with Databricks, Hometrack will be able to increase the scale and speed of innovation.  

“We are already the leading AVM, yet 70% of all valuations still happen in person. By using Databricks we can improve AVM acceptance rates and reduce the data team’s effort required to manage our platform by more than 60%. This approach enables us to speed up the delivery of new products to market and access new revenue streams. ” said Dave Morris, Director of Engineering, Hometrack. “Banks and large financial institutions face challenges when adopting new systems, but by partnering with Hometrack, they can access new technology in a managed way, which keeps them at the leading edge of innovation.”  

Databricks’ Lakehouse Platform helps organizations accelerate innovation by unifying data teams with an open, scalable platform for all of their data-driven use cases. From streaming analytics and AI to business intelligence (BI), Databricks provides a modern lakehouse architecture that unifies data engineering, data science, machine learning and analytics within a single collaborative platform. 

As the cornerstone of the Collateral Risk Platform, Hometrack’s AVM has been used to value over £200bn of mortgage products over the last five years. 

Underpinned by expert technology, the AVM easily integrates into lenders’ existing architecture to manage risk, choose the best value assessment option - AVM, desktop or physical, ultimately enabling loans to be approved, in as little as two minutes.  

“The work Hometrack is doing is at the forefront of enabling data-driven decision making, delivering increased efficiencies in traditional processes to solve tough problems. The Databricks Lakehouse Platform facilitates easy integration to an established platform, which is more efficient than building your own. This allows development resources to be directed into the product offerings, which in turn drives revenue for customers.”