Boston-based Hometap, a fintech company offering an alternative home equity tapping product, announced on Wednesday the launch of a new online portal called the “Home Equity Dashboard.”
The Home Equity Dashboard offers homeowners a free centralized platform to understand their home equity, as well as other information and tools, according to the company.
The current dashboard features include tools for data visualization of home value, mortgage, and current home equity as well as estimates for up to 10 years; forecasts based on different home appreciation scenarios; maintenance checklists, which are broken out by season; a home renovation calculator to estimate costs of different kinds of work; and home services offers from Hometap’s partner network.
“Amidst higher interest rates and rising inflation, home equity remains at near-record levels, but many homeowners still struggle to understand how much home equity they have or how they can use it,” said Adam Sigel, VP of Product at Hometap. “With the launch of the Dashboard, we are providing Americans with a one-stop shop for managing their home equity, both now and down the road, to give them more control of their financial futures.”
Hometap’s current shared equity investment product customers will automatically have dashboard credentials assigned to them, according to the company.
Hometap has described itself in the past as a “complementary” product to offerings in the reverse mortgage industry. In a 2022 interview, Hometap CEO Jeffrey Glass said that seniors are an important demographic for the company’s growth especially considering the levels of equity they have access to through their homes.
“I think this is one of these things where, as this industry is becoming a little bit more well-known and as this idea of a home equity investment becomes a little bit more popular and understood, it’s becoming something where we and folks inside the reverse industry and other industries are starting to collaborate more and more,” Glass said. “It’s a big world out there, and there’s a variety of solutions. As we say, just as debt may not be the right answer for some homeowners, our home equity investment may not be the right answer.”
According to a study by Hometap, over 40% of homeowners remain unaware of how much equity they have tied up in their properties, increasing the likelihood of financial hardship and which can make homeowners vulnerable to instability in financial markets. Less than 38% of respondents also said that they felt “very confident” in managing costs associated with homeownership beyond a mortgage payment.
