Cashflow Diary™

Senior Vice President of Communications at RealtyTrac, Daren Blomquist tells stories about the housing market in a unique way. He does it with data! That means the story is very, very accurate. Maybe that’s why RealtyTrac is so widely used by professionals in the real estate industry and investors alike. 

Before Daren was the “Data Geek” he is today, he was a newspaper reporter in Illinois. A big part of his job was researching, using data to help him write stories and learning how to paint the big picture for readers. Eventually he moved to California where he joined a little startup company in the customer service department. Daren says that was a really good thing, because he got to talk to a lot of customers. It gave him the inside “Trac” on what they wanted. That information comes in handy to Daren in his current position. 

Today, Daren is one of the company’s longest-term employees and has been with RealtyTrac since 2001. A noted real estate expert – on home sales trends, tax and deed loan information, property values; investor and cash sales share of the market, foreclosure activity and rates as well as extensive neighborhood and environmental data and overall housing market trends.

Daren is directly responsible for the creation of the company’s comprehensive real estate reports, which are cited by thousands of media outlets nationwide — including all the major news networks and leading publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and USA TODAY. He has been quoted in hundreds of national and local publications and has appeared on many national network broadcasts, including CBS, ABC, CNN, CNBC, FOX Business and Bloomberg.

One of the things Daren says RealtyTrac wants to stay true to is being transparent. He says it’s not about “spin” but the full picture of what’s going on in the real estate market. At its core, RealtyTrac is a data provider, and while its strong suit is foreclosure data the company continues to evolve. Now there is total transparency in the data they provide so that investors can use the site to determine is a property is a go or no-go deal. 

At www.RealtyTrac.com you can access their entire and incredibly impressive database of properties using a massive number of filters to find only the types of properties you like. (That’s called knowing your Investor Identity!)

While the data reflects US properties only, there are plenty of international investors who use the system to figure out good investments. This includes commercial properties. So everything you are interested in, from single-family houses to multifamily properties to commercial properties, you can find them on RealtyTrac.

Daren is also a trend spotter. According to his data, he’s seeing a few trends in the market today. The most noticeable is that the market is trending back from a distressed market and adjusting to the middle of the road. While that’s good for now… there’s big change coming, because the market trends are cyclic. Already there are indicators that certain bubbles are going to burst soon, because in some areas there are extreme pricing peaks. San Francisco is one of those markets. 

Learn more. LISTEN NOW.