Plunk, the first real-time analytics platform for residential real estate, today announced key appointments to its Advisory Board: Rich Hughes, head of Data Science at RealPage; Justin Lajoie, former vice president of Product and Engineering at Zillow; Chris Heiden, former head of Customer Science at Wells Fargo and senior director at Zillow Group; and Neal Oman, senior technical advisor for Data Science and Analytics at Pacific Northwest National Laboratories. These accomplished data science professionals will constitute the Plunk Board of Advisors and help guide the next evolution of Plunk’s Dynamic Valuation Model™ and real-time analytics platform for residential real estate.
“The vast experience and market insights these advisors bring to our mission will be invaluable,” said Brian Lent, chief executive officer and co-founder of Plunk. “We’re pushing all the boundaries of data science to enable homeowners, real estate professionals, and investors to make more fully-informed decisions in real time.”
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“We have assembled the data science dream team,” added David Bluhm, president and co-founder of Plunk. “The collective contributions they have made—and will help us make—towards a more frictionless real estate industry are quite humbling.”
Rich Hughes currently serves as the head of Data Science at RealPage, a multibillion-dollar international SaaS technology provider for multi-family housing. Hughes’ investment management solutions currently price over a trillion dollars of residential housing while benchmarking and valuing housing amenities.
Justin Lajoie was most recently vice president of Product and Engineering at Zillow where he led product and engineering teams that made Zillow Offers a reality nationwide. Prior to Zillow, Lajoie was founder and chief executive officer at Diverse Solutions, a SaaS IDX property search software and CRM for real estate agents and brokers, which was acquired by Zillow.
Chris Heiden most recently led Wells Fargo’s Customer Science team. At Zillow Group, he led the data science efforts for its rentals group. Heiden has a history of deploying analytics toward driving rational decision-making within organizations. At JPMorgan Chase, he was co-inventor of a statistical method which allowed the bank to understand the financial value of services, such as bill pay and fee waivers. He later led corporate strategy analytics for Chase Bank before building the marketing analytics practice for Amazon Student Programs.
Neal Oman has spent over 30 years serving in a variety of technical executive, line management, and technical individual contributor roles in software systems engineering and applied research. The most recent 20 of those years were focused on applied artificial intelligence and machine learning. Oman is currently a senior technical advisor for Data Science and Analytics at Pacific Northwest National Lab, where he supports agencies across the U.S. government working to leverage AI and ML. Prior to PNNL, he was vice president of Research and Head of Data Science at HERE Technologies.
About Plunk
Plunk is an advanced analytics company revolutionizing the way homeowners, home experts, and investors value and invest in residential real estate—through the next-generation application of artificial intelligence, machine learning and image analysis.