Allan Weiss

Career

Weiss received his B.S. in Computer Science and Physics from Brandeis University in 1981, and his MA in Public and Private Management from Yale University in 1989. He co-founded Case Shiller Weiss in 1991 to fill a gap in market awareness of ongoing price changes in residential real estate. He accomplished this by translating a highly regarded academic paper on a new indexing technique into a nationally recognized home price indexing standard, now known as the S&P Case-Shiller Index.

Following the establishment of the indexes, Weiss led CSW’s development of forecasts of the Case-Shiller Indexes which were published in The Wall Street Journal for over five years. CSW also licensed the indexes and forecasts to mortgage investors used to price transactions involving over $50 billion of residential mortgages.

In 1993 he co-authored a paper with Karl Case and Robert Shiller “Index-Based Futures and Options Markets in Real Estate”, published in the Journal of Portfolio Management. The paper defines and analyzes a method to hedge and invest in home prices. In 2004 this proposal became a reality when the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched home price futures based on the Case-Shiller Indexes.

In 1995 Weiss conceived of a novel approach to automated real asset valuation and led the CSW team to develop the CASA automated home valuation service.

In 1997, Weiss conceived of a new financial structure enabling equity market investors to hedge or invest in home prices and other economic indexes. Weiss named the structure the Proxy Asset Data Processor and along with Shiller received two US patents, 5987435 and 6513020, for these inventions. Weiss along with Robert Shiller founded Macro Securities to commercialize this invention. Securities under these patents have traded on the American Stock Exchange (UOY and DOY) and the New York Stock Exchange (UMM and DMM).

Weiss also identified a major uninsured home-ownership risk: loss of home value due to market declines. In 1999 in collaboration with Robert Shiller, he published "Home Equity Insurance" in the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.

The sale of Case Shiller Weiss, Inc. to Fiserv caused Weiss to observe the extent to which smaller assets are worth less, for each dollar they earn, than larger more liquid assets; therefore liquid assets generate lower income per dollar invested. Seeing how much the owners of the smaller assets could benefit from higher prices if some of their cash flows were aggregated into a larger more liquid fund, Weiss patented Common Index Securities – US patents 7155468 and 7716106 – that allows for the creation of financing structures that generate liquid and therefore value enhanced investments by aggregating cash flows from these smaller assets. This solution applies to any asset class whose value or earnings can be reliably indexed.

In 2007, Weiss founded Market Shield™ Capital to commercialize Market Shield™ funds and Market Shield ™ Mortgage loans based on the investment structure called Common Index Securities that Mr. Weiss patented in 2006.

Weiss founded Weiss Residential Research LLC in 2012 and currently serves as the CEO. He founded Weiss Res to help fill the knowledge and innovation gap that lead to the great housing crash of 2007 as well as to help mitigate the financial risk of home ownership going forward. It is a pioneer in next generation home price analytics. Building on his unique expertise in repeat sales home price indexes, WeissRes has increased the resolution of market analysis by nearly 10,000-fold. There are nearly 50 million repeat sales indexes, one for each house, created through the use of Big Data techniques, novel algorithms and by harnessing the power of massively parallel multi-CPU computing power.

The WeissRes approach presents home price dynamics at the house level or any user defined aggregation. Instead of being forced to use arbitrary market definitions such as 'metro area', users can define their own markets such as 'all houses with a current value above $500,000 within a 50-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty.' In some cases markets organically define themselves as can be seen by the clustering in our market maps and dynamic maps. New trends can therefore be discovered, new sub markets defined, compared and ranked.

Patents

2013 "Indexed Based Liquidity System and Method", U.S. Patent #8,468,079 2013 "Indexed Payment Stream System and Method", U.S. Patent #8,346,654 2011 “Market-Indexed Mortgage System and Method", U.S. Patent #8,082,202 2010 “Common Index Securities”, U.S. Patent #7,716,106 2006 “Common Index Securities”, U.S. Patent #7,155,468 2003 “Proxy Asset Data Processor” (with Robert Shiller), U.S. Patent #6,513,020 1999 “Proxy Asset Data Processor” (with Robert Shiller), U.S. Patent #5,987,435

Coauthored Papers

“Moral Hazard and Home Equity Conversion" Real Estate Economics, Vol. 28, No. 1, 2000.[see CFDP 1177, CFP 1015]

"Evaluating Real Estate Valuation Systems" Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, (1999) 18(2):147-61. [CFP 983]

"Home Equity Insurance" Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, 19:1, 21-47, 1999. [see CFDP 1074, CFP 1007]

“Mortgage Default Risk and Real Estate Prices: The Use of Index-Based Futures and Options in Real Estate” 1995, NBER Working Papers 5078, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

"Index-Based Futures and Options Markets in Real Estate" Journal of Portfolio Management (Winter 1993). [CFDP 1006]