Tumlis and REALizer: Pioneering the Future of Accurate Real Estate Valuation

The annual Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco consistently serves as a vibrant hub for innovation, drawing together forward-thinking technologists dedicated to refining the real estate landscape. These pioneers aim to empower agents and, ultimately, elevate the experience for consumers. While giants like Zillow and Trulia once stood among these disruptors, the industry is constantly evolving, giving rise to new solutions designed to address their limitations.

Last week, during this dynamic gathering, I had the privilege of interviewing one of the most compelling innovators in the field: Tom Horvath, CEO and founder of Tumlis. Tumlis, a progressive Bay Area brokerage, is making significant waves by offering agents free lead generation and comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) services. But their most recent and arguably groundbreaking release is the REALizer, a proprietary home pricing module. This sophisticated real estate dashboard equips agents with an unparalleled tool to accurately price homes, analyze crucial market timing, and unlock a wealth of other vital insights for their clients.

The Vision Behind Tumlis: Efficiency and Progress

“Real Estate is all about efficiency and progress,” asserts Tom Horvath, encapsulating the core philosophy driving Tumlis. “We’ve built a platform of services which serves that very purpose.” His vision stems from a deep understanding of the industry’s historical challenges and the critical need for more precise and actionable data.

Tom Horvath brings substantial “boots on the ground” experience to his entrepreneurial endeavor. With 35 years as a top-selling residential and commercial broker in the demanding San Francisco Bay Area market, he intimately understands the complexities of property valuation. His enduring challenge, which began incubating as an idea as far back as 1996, was how to efficiently price homes and assess market worth at a local level, on a mass basis, and crucially, at a low cost. The solution, which has been meticulously developed over three years, is Tumlis’s REALizer. Tom explains that REALizer will help agents achieve a multitude of objectives:

Accurately determine the true value of a home.
Advise buyers and sellers on the optimal time to take action.
Forecast how long a property will likely remain on the market at a given price.
Understand the direct influence of “days on market” on a home’s eventual selling price.
Even gauge the future popularity and trajectory of specific neighborhoods.

REALizer: Redefining Home Valuation Accuracy

The accuracy of REALizer‘s home pricing estimates is startling, especially when benchmarked against well-known industry players. In one specific market analysis, REALizer’s overall pricing estimates were an astonishing $2.15 million higher than Zillow’s and $1.45 million higher than Trulia’s. This striking difference underscores a fundamental flaw in many automated valuation models (AVMs) and highlights REALizer‘s superior precision, finally delivering truly accurate data to the hands of agents and consumers.

Beyond Automated Valuations: The Science of REALizer’s Accuracy

“The reason for our accuracy is that we don’t utilize a broad range of sold data as comparable,” Tom clarifies. This distinction is critical. Traditional AVMs often cast a wide net, sometimes including properties that, while geographically proximate, may not be truly comparable in condition, features, or qualitative aspects. “We segment the data and ask the user (the agent) to provide qualitative and conditional attributes. No other AVM that I am aware of does this.”

This innovative approach means that the REALizer engine doesn’t just crunch numbers; it incorporates invaluable human insight. Agents, with their intimate knowledge of specific properties and micro-markets, provide nuanced details about a target property’s location, views, the condition of its interior, and the state of its exterior, rating these on a four-tier scale. This qualitative input, combined with sophisticated data segmentation, allows the REALizer to select properties in the specific area that are most similar to the one being researched. This rigorous methodology is precisely how REALizer provides significantly more accurate value estimates while maintaining a robust and statistically sound sample size.

As every seasoned agent, seller, or appraiser understands, a home’s true worth is determined by comparing it to genuinely relevant comparable properties. This is an art that most AVMs struggle with, primarily because they often rely on a singular algorithm or a limited set of data points. REALizer, by contrast, employs a robust suite of 12 distinct algorithms, integrating a comprehensive array of data sources:

Prices of recently sold homes.
Asking prices from multiple listing services (MLS) and other public sources.
Average asking and sold prices of similar homes, ensuring a minimum of four to five direct comparables within the neighborhood.

Furthermore, it clearly displays how many similar properties are currently for sale and their average days on market. This multi-faceted approach, critically informed by agent input, allows the REALizer engine to churn and compare homes with an unparalleled level of detail and relevance.

Empowering Agents: A Holistic Platform for Success

While the REALizer’s pricing accuracy is its flagship feature, Tumlis offers a much broader ecosystem designed to empower real estate professionals. The REALizer platform is seamlessly integrated with a comprehensive package of essential agent tools, including robust CRM functionalities, targeted social media assistance, and automated email marketing capabilities. This entire suite of services is designed to be accessible, with an estimated release price of approximately $9.95 per month.

“We are going to make our money with a product that has real value, NOT by holding the real estate agents hostage,” Tom states emphatically. This ethos reflects a commitment to a partnership model, providing agents with powerful tools that genuinely enhance their business, rather than creating dependency or exorbitant costs.

With this sophisticated data at their fingertips, agents can interpret and explain the intricate market dynamics to sellers, offering clients a pure, statistical analysis of where their home precisely fits into the current market. They can then advise on how aggressively to price it, with the ability to tweak and tailor the recommendations based on each seller’s individual needs and goals. “The question all sellers have: if I sell, where do I price for the best selling price and how long shall I expect to sell it,” Tom elaborates. “Now I can answer them. We have acquired data never before acquired and run it through a patent-pending process.” This revolutionary capability extends to buyers as well, offering them equally valuable insights into fair pricing and market conditions.

The tool also features an intuitive online slider bar that allows agents to fine-tune their qualitative assessment of a home, providing an added layer of customization and precision. These refined estimates even come with a four-star confidence rating, which self-assesses the reliability of its own comparable selections, adding a transparent layer of validation.

The “Crown Jewel”: Predictive Analytics and Market Insights

Tom Horvath refers to a specific facet of this data as “the crown jewel” of REALizer: the integrated buyer, seller, and agent insights derived directly from the analytics engine and fed into the platform for each property. These insights go far beyond simple valuation; they meticulously rate a home’s current market status, forecast the market’s probable direction in relation to the specific property and its comparables, and even inform the user whether it is currently a buyer’s or seller’s market. This level of predictive intelligence transforms raw data into actionable strategies.

So, is REALizer simply another new-fangled Automated Valuation Model? “No,” Tom asserts. His product fundamentally distinguishes itself by allowing consumers and agents to conduct a true price discovery process, complete with multiple adjustable parameters. The REALizer estimates not only the asking price but also the likely selling price and anticipated days on market for a comprehensive set of relevant comparable homes, crucially doing so without any “cherry-picking” of data. Looking ahead, Tom hopes to further enhance the tool’s accuracy by integrating historic models with data extending back 20 years, providing an even richer context for market analysis.

Future Innovations and National Expansion

One of the most exciting aspects of Tumlis’s future roadmap involves leveraging its detailed data input to conduct sophisticated analyses of property attributes that directly impact a home’s selling price and days on market. Imagine knowing, with data-backed certainty, whether higher ceilings genuinely contribute to faster sales than lower ones, or if larger kitchens are consistently preferred over expansive master bedrooms. “I can hardly wait!” Tom exclaims, anticipating the revolutionary insights these granular analyses will unlock for agents and developers alike.

Currently, Tumlis has successfully launched its innovative platform in key Californian markets, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, and the North San Francisco Bay Area. However, their ambitions extend far beyond California. Tumlis has strategic plans for nationwide expansion, with specific targets including North Texas, with a projected presence in Dallas by next April. In each of these live markets, the company will operate as a brokerage, but with a unique focus: exclusively representing buy-side investors. This specialized approach allows Tumlis to fine-tune its services and value proposition for a distinct segment of the real estate market.

Adding to its robust capabilities, the new predictive analytics tool also furnishes chart-based visualizations. These charts detail several key indices for comparable homes over the previous year, including intricate price changes, dynamic market activity levels, and crucial inventory levels. Tumlis further enhances this by providing a forward-looking prediction of where each index is likely headed over the next several months. “Tumlis uses inventory as a predictor of velocity and velocity as a predictor of price,” explains Chris Butler, Tumlis’s chief operating officer. This sophisticated, interconnected analytical framework signals a significant shift in market forecasting, prompting a bold declaration: “Watch out, Case-Shiller!” The implication is clear: Tumlis is not just playing the game; it’s changing the rules, offering a more nuanced and powerful approach to understanding and predicting real estate market movements.