This piques my interest, as I have worked in this space for some years, AND I've had terrible experiences purchasing homes in Bay Area and elsewhere.
Product questions:
- How is your solution better/different/cheaper for buyers who would otherwise choose a discount buyer realtor services from Zillow or Redfin?
- Who will be doing the tours?
- Are you offering a tour-only non-exclusive representation agreements?
Business questions:
- Seller agents in the Bay Area will definitely "blacklist" buyers who use this, as they've done for Redfin and Open Listings. How are you solving this?
- Why are incumbent giants not building this? Are you worried or solving for some unknown pressure that stalls tech-realty startups in general?
- Residential real estate transactions more often than not require some high-touch shenanigans due to things like liens, solar loans, inspections, contingencies, negotiations, etc... how are you solving for this?
> Seller agents in the Bay Area will definitely "blacklist" buyers who use this, as they've done for Redfin and Open Listings. How are you solving this?
OL founder here. A few points to consider:
- We represented buyers on plenty of transactions in the Bay Area and had very competitive acceptance rates. Of course there is an art to being included in the counter process but unsurprisingly, sellers mostly optimize for expected value (money * certainty) and the highest legit offer wins. Vague notions of not wanting to transact with a "disruptor" go away pretty quickly when you realize it's a bona-fide offer + compelling buyer letter + pro agent who has done way more successful transactions than most. If you have a standardized process for preparing and presenting offers in a market and optimize it over thousands of reps, you can actually submit pretty compelling offers.
- An actual point of friction/discrimination to consider (that applies to all markets) is when the user is at an open house and the listing agent asks who their agent is. When they said OL, the agent would often try to dunk on us and steal the client. Important to prep the buyer with what to say in this moment so that this doesn't happen (e.g. tell them to just give the name of the agent who would be delivering their offers + give them compelling stats about that agent's performance). Rare that they'd bad-mouth a named person to their client.
- Throughout the time we operated, the Bay Area was a relatively small and unique market. We had a healthy business there from the early-adopter techie crowd, but ultimately focused more in Los Angeles because the market diversity yielded more useful product insights. Do not design for the Bay if you're trying to build a national (or even CA-wide) real estate product!
- Zillow doesn't actually transact homes themselves, once you click that you're interested in a house, a realtor will call you who is non-zillow affiliated, they could be with any brokerage. Redfin only offers you discount services if you buy + sell through them, but most people buying in the bay area aren't simultaneously selling a home through Redfin.
- We are currently using a 3rd party showing service which has people come and literally open doors.
- Yes we are offering representation agreements to help people tour in light of the NAR suit.
- We will solve the blacklist problem when we get to that size. Not going to start running before catching the ball.
- Incumbents like Zillow have agents as their primary customer, they wouldn't put out their main customer. Redfin's model is to have the human agent at the heart of their product, it would have to be completely remade if the customer was using the interface.
- Liens are analyzed using our disclosure summary tool. Solar loans are often liens, so same applies. Inspections are a disclosure. Contingencies fall into 5 buckets which are fairly standard of inspection/mortgage/insurance/title/appraisal. Negotiations are usually done over text message or email.
Product questions:
- How is your solution better/different/cheaper for buyers who would otherwise choose a discount buyer realtor services from Zillow or Redfin?
- Who will be doing the tours?
- Are you offering a tour-only non-exclusive representation agreements?
Business questions:
- Seller agents in the Bay Area will definitely "blacklist" buyers who use this, as they've done for Redfin and Open Listings. How are you solving this?
- Why are incumbent giants not building this? Are you worried or solving for some unknown pressure that stalls tech-realty startups in general?
- Residential real estate transactions more often than not require some high-touch shenanigans due to things like liens, solar loans, inspections, contingencies, negotiations, etc... how are you solving for this?