Innovation is Inman’s DNA — that’s why we’re excited about August’s event Technology and Innovation Month. We’ll kick things off by expanding our scope to celebrate the companies and individuals driving the industry forward Inman Innovation Award exist Inman Connect Las Vegas. We then continue our celebration of the brightest minds in real estate all month long.
Inman Innovation Award winners Inspectify and Courted have appeared in this column several times over the past few years, dominating word counts due to their respective business models, each aiming to improve key trademarks of long-standing industry inefficiencies.
Inspectify aims to change the outsized impact that post-contract home inspections have on the closing, recently launching an insurance option that reduces the rate of canceled closings or unreasonable buyer credit. Courted is enabling agencies to become smarter about recruiting and retention, applying machine learning and crafted profiles to recruiting decisions. Each application is an asset to the industry in its own way.
This year has brought me more companies that fit the bill and, if adopted and integrated with due diligence, can make the brokerages that use them more consumer-focused, convenient, and operationally stable. This is good for everyone. So let’s take a look.
San Francisco-based Avenue 8 has ceased brokerage operations to focus on expanding Sidekick, its artificial intelligence-based brokerage productivity solution.
Costing $25 per month, the artificial intelligence allows users to request help with many common real estate business tasks using a minimal interface. Along the way, it learns each user’s preferences to ensure it responds to a person’s specific location or workflow habits, for example.
Sidekick can pull MLS data to generate market reports and use listing images to generate property descriptions, as well as perform customer communications and marketing campaigns, retrieve mortgage product information and local sales data, and often create many agents that would typically take hours to complete. content to immediately hold a client meeting or promotional meeting.
Building a mobile app is not easy. This is a longer, more expensive, and more complex job than most people imagine. However, the team at Eden got the job done in the hope that they could change the way people search for homes and what they pay to do so. Using artificial intelligence to search better wasn’t their idea, it’s always been there, but their algorithm is by far the smartest and most intuitive I’ve ever seen.
Eden is not a discount brokerage, but uses artificial intelligence to reduce the workload and add value to agents working with buyers. According to the company, the app’s search capabilities are advanced enough, and its artificial intelligence learns quickly, to significantly reduce the burden of travel and handheld operations that have long plagued buyer’s agents. The buyer can be given control of the search and the agent is not excluded from the relationship.
Last year, Ylopo showed me an AI voice imitation system that could handle unknown calls for users. However, this practice likely won’t be legal for long, so the company took artificial intelligence and taught it how to teach people. Technically, MaverickRE is a sister company to Ylopo, but it could be the Marcia Brady of Ylopo products.
In addition to the typical agent rankings and lead source analysis capabilities (all of which can be segmented by team or brokerage division), another core value proposition of MaverickRE is AI-based sales training.
Users can choose a sales scenario, such as pitching to a “confused buyer” or a “selfless seller,” activate the artificial intelligence player, and respond instantly to the bot. Email performance reports are generated after every call, and naturally, the AI becomes more realistic over time. As of this writing, 60 scenarios are included, covering a range of sales challenges such as divorce, relocation, death of the estate, and 1031 Exchange requirements.
The app, which just emerged from stealth, provides a digital portal for foreign real estate investors to purchase properties in the United States.
Waltz assists investors in setting up U.S. banking operations and LLCs, obtaining EINs, transferring currency and securely wire funds. While the company will conduct direct marketing efforts to investors, it will work with real estate agents to educate them about its workflow efficiencies and demonstrate that long-standing administrative barriers for external investors can be overcome with just an advanced technology solution. .
This is a great tool for real estate agents who have friends overseas or property managers who want to expand into new markets. It doesn’t take much to start expanding your marketing reach to places like Spain, Switzerland, or Brazil.
Waltz deployed a very lightweight, mobile-inspired front end that certainly had time to mature during the long period of stealth. I see some promise for the future, and it’s just going in the right direction.
StackWrap is a productivity software that serves as the top layer of a brokerage firm’s technology stack and can better organize, access and understand the firm’s most commonly used applications. The solution was built by Max Fitzgerald, who owns the independent brokerage Craft & Bauer.
Users can connect any number of common systems (Follow Up Boss, SkySlope, MLS, etc.) to the StackWrap interface, giving them a place to start working. The main dashboard provides a modern, smart layout and simple navigation design, allowing you to access the content you need with one click.
Need to check agreement signature? Click on your DocuSign link. Do new prospects sign up for the newsletter? Hop over to Mailchimp or SendGrid and see what’s available.
This app doesn’t add noise to the real estate tech, it provides a way to control the volume.
HomeStack is a Lego mobile app that is a turn-key solution that helps independent brokerage firms create powerful, consumer-facing business applications with the same functionality as more expensive ad-hoc build software.
HomeStack comes equipped with home discovery capabilities, a CRM, on-board communications with two-way activity notifications, lead routing, travel scheduling, and other tools that should be in line with the expectations of any tech-savvy technical administrator or broker looking to find new ways to add value to its operations. It links with more than 200 listing services to ensure its listing profiles are tightly integrated.
The advantages of using branded action experiences in the enterprise are many, but the reality is that good experiences are not easy to find because they are too high-impact for agencies. HomeStack is a B2B2C model, which means it’s a version of one business selling a product to another business, and the other business selling the product to consumers. Resellers are not engaged in software sales.
That’s not all that’s great about the tech sector this year, but some of the companies that I think have done well. For some of the more popular options, check out this article from Inman contributor Jimmy Burgess.
With just a few months left in the year, many industry issues are about to unfold. I will be watching how our innovators respond.
Email Craig Rowe
