RealtyTrac Brings on E-Commerce Specialist

IRVINE, CA-Locally based national source for housing data RealtyTrac has hired e-commerce specialist David Towers as SVP of revenue generation and operations. Towers will oversee the RealtyTrac website and call-center operations as well as grow and improve revenue for the entire company, working with the firm's national sales department and product-management teams to develop new ways to optimize operations.

Towers brings more than 19 years of experience to the firm, with extensive knowledge in leading high-performance e-commerce, marketing and operations teams. He has held senior management positions in a diverse group of companies including Wet Seal, Westfield, Razorfish, Liz Claiborne and J. Crew. He was most recently VP of e-commerce at Wet Seal, a fashion-apparel retail operating 525 stores in the US. There, Towers stabilized and streamlined the e-commerce division during company restructuring.

“I was familiar with RealtyTrac as the go-to source for foreclosure information, but I was not fully aware of the wealth of information in the RealtyTrac database available for almost any home nationwide,” says Towers. “This is the type of critical information that every consumer should be armed with before they make any decision regarding real estate—whether they are a homeowner, buyer, renter, investor or real estate professional. I'm looking forward to finding innovative ways to make this data more accessible and understandable for a broader audience.”

According to Jamie Moyle, RealtyTrac's CEO, the firm has “exponentially ramped up our data-acquisition operations over the past two years, leaving us with an abundance of data that hasn't yet made it to the website. That means RealtyTrac customers just scratch the surface when it comes to the billions of relevant data points that we've aggregated on more than 100 million properties nationwide. David has the experience and know-how to help us effectively present that vast database in a user-friendly manner so that ultimately consumers can make smart, data-driven decisions about real estate, whether that be a home they are living in—or want to live in—or their portfolio of investment properties.”

As GlobeSt.com reported last week, the Federal Housing Administration's 203(k) program is the government's answer to the problem of the aging housing supply, according to Jake Adger, chief economist at RealtyTrac. Adger says that through the program, owner-occupant buyers can finance the purchase, rehab and upgrade of an older home, while homeowners can also take advantage of the program to roll rehab costs in a refinance.