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Cash offer pioneer Flyhomes said it is preparing to expand nationally after acquiring the assets of ZeroDown and launching an artificial intelligence search portal, aiming to compete with household names such as Zillow, Realtor.com and Homes.com.
ZeroDown co-founders Laks Srini and Abhijeet Dwivedi have joined Flyhomes — Srini as chief technology officer and Dwivedi as chief growth officer — as the company on Tuesday launched Flyhomes AI, its new “conversational real estate search” portal in 28 states and Washington. , DC
Seattle-based Flyhomes, a vertically integrated real estate brokerage and mortgage lender, will expand into markets it has not yet entered by partnering with agents and teams from other brokerage firms. Flyhomes co-founder and CEO Tushar Garg told Inman that these agents will receive leads and have access to Flyhomes’ technology, cash offers and buy-now financial products.
Flyhomes executives say upcoming changes to how real estate agents are compensated, including a new rule requiring buyers’ agents to sign contracts with potential clients before showing them homes, should help accelerate the adoption of Flyhomes AI, which Artificial intelligence pulls data from more than 40 sources to answer questions about the home and its surroundings.
Tushar Garg
Garg said in a statement that the new rules “are the most significant changes in real estate in more than 100 years and will fundamentally change the buyer-agent dynamic.” “This barrier to signing a contract early will cause many buyers to delay contacting an agent, thereby limiting their access to information provided by the agent. This will create huge friction in the market, and artificial intelligence is reaching technological maturity at just the right time. Be the solution.
Headquartered in San Francisco, ZeroDown launched a rent-to-own service in 2019 and has since developed what it calls “the most advanced home search on the planet.”
ZeroDown (now Flyhomes AI) leverages 900 data points on each home and its surroundings, including licensing history, natural disaster risk, investment potential, and mobile phone and broadband coverage.
While other search portals supplement multiple listing service data with information from other sources, Flyhomes AI makes this data discoverable through “conversational search” (natural language search queries).
Ask general questions (“Show me houses near good schools”) or specific questions about the listing (“Is there a high-voltage power line near this property?”) and Flyhomes AI will provide property results or answers in plain English.
“If I wanted to buy a house, I would ask all these questions,” Garg told Inman. “People open 50 Google tabs and ask these questions in different places. We put them all in one place. It’s very simple.
After helping integrate ZeroDown’s conversational real estate search engine into Flyhomes AI, Srini and Dwivedi will be part of the company’s plans to expand its capabilities and bring it to new markets.
Lax Srini
“The past two years have shown us all that consumers are ready to embrace artificial intelligence,” Srini said in a statement. “They talk to ChatGPT as a human being and trust their lives to self-driving cars. Automobiles. Real estate has been largely untouched by artificial intelligence, but commission litigation will quickly increase demand for information that cannot be obtained from photos or drone footage.
Srini said potential buyers can use Flyhomes AI to “get as far down the home buying path as they want” on their own time, with no pressure to sell.
Abhijit Dwivedi
“The buyer’s agent will still play an important role in the transaction, but you cannot ignore that the buyer-agent relationship will change after August 17,” Dwivedi said in a statement. “No one knows exactly how buyers and agents will work together in this new world, but we do know consumers will need access to information and agents will be under unprecedented pressure to demonstrate value.”
Garg expects Flyhomes AI to be “a very powerful tool for agents because if you walk into a house with a customer, they’re going to ask you a bunch of questions,” he said. “Okay, now you can ask [Flyhomes AI] You already have the answer.
Other portals are looking for ways to incorporate artificial intelligence into their search processes. For example, RocketHomes.com’s new visual search tool, Explore Spaces, uses an artificial intelligence feature called computer vision to identify and process listing photos to help home buyers zero in on properties of interest.
But Flyhomes executives said that after acquiring the technology developed by ZeroDown, they were two years ahead of the competition.
“This is definitely not just a ChatGPT plugin or filter manipulation,” said Justin O’Neill, director of public relations at Flyhomes. “This is purpose-built for real estate.”
That helps explain why Flyhomes thinks it can compete with the likes of Zillow, Realtor.com and Redfin in the search portal wars.
“This is not a brand new product,” Garg said of ZeroDown’s user base. “We had a million users without any SEO, marketing, PR, backlinks—nothing. Just because the product was so compelling.
While Flyhomes has historically employed its own in-house agents, it will work with agents and agency teams in new markets to drive its ambitious expansion plans.
“In some markets we have our own teams, but in all other markets we want to expand nationally with agency partners,” Garg said. “We’ve been working with a ton of great teams in every community. They can get super qualified leads from us, use our tools, and they’ll get financial products so they can help their customers as well.
Founded in 2016 by Garg and Stephen Lane, Flyhomes Inc. provides end-to-end home buying services through ancillary businesses such as Flyhomes Brokerage, Flyhomes Mortgage (also doing business as Sailbridge) and Flyhomes Closing.
After raising $150 million in Series C funding in 2021, Flyhomes expanded its operations in California and entered new markets such as Texas, Colorado and Idaho.
The acquisition of ZeroDown is Flhome’s latest effort to escape the crippling impact of rising mortgage rates on home sales.
As mortgage rates climbed in 2022, Flyhomes announced two rounds of layoffs, followed by another round in December. Flyhomes co-founder Lane left the company in August to serve as head of venture capital at Insurify.
Last fall, Flyhomes launched a partner pipeline that provides buy-before-sell services to mortgage lenders and brokers nationwide. Garg said Flyhomes financial products are now available on a wholesale basis to agents and lenders in 40 states.
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