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Not Your Typical Real Estate Mobile Apps

Written by Posted On Tuesday, 08 March 2016 05:26

 

The property sector is a precarious and unpredictable market. One day it could be great, the next day it could be the opposite. Over the years, we’ve seen a series of housing bubbles taking over several booms not only in America, but also across the globe: Japan, China, the United Kingdom—name it. And it is also vulnerable to almost every aspect of the economy. Factors like growing buying power, change in government policies, increase in interest rates, reassessment of market values, and even constantly changing commodity prices essential in the housing and construction industry could easily alter the sector without warning.

These alterations in the industry could directly affect sellers, buyers, and property owners. Any negative news on the market can be a burden for them as it could alter buying perceptions, choices, and predilections. However, everyone knows that these are inevitable occurrences not even builders and government officials have full control of. But not all people believe that we just have to accept this reality without even doing anything about it.

For technology entrepreneur Dom Einhorn, there’s no other way to beat these inevitable alterations than being aware of whatever that is happening on the market. For him, awareness is the beginning of having an understanding of the market as a whole. When he was still conceptualizing Born2Invest with his long-term business partner Adrian Beeston, one of his goals was to make it a substantial tool in educating people on the rudiments and technicalities of various industries, including the housing market.  

Einhorn and Beeston are both aware that not everyone would make time to read an article on housing or a newsflash on the global construction market. This type of write-up is typically inundated with numbers, policies, and abbreviated terms that are not easy to understand especially if you’re just a regular guy dreaming of buying a new home. Even some company CEOs would not waste time on skimming through these statistics and currency-replete articles.

Born2Invest, a content curation app for business and finance, carries and disseminates content from the best and respected finance websites in the marketing world. It distributes latest studies and reports from the most revered market analysts of a specific segment, news from global finance authorities, and analyses from industry experts and economists. But what makes it special is that it delivers the content in a summarized form—80 words or less—and make it as digestible, readable, and understandable as it can be without losing its meaning and essence.

Einhorn and Beeston designed Born2Invest for the busy professionals who barely have time to read all the most important news on the market. It also caters to property firm owners and real estate agents who want to understand their industry without dealing with technical terms and analyses. However, users can still access the full article in case they feel like knowing more about the industry. In that regard, the app is also the company’s way of persuading people to learn about a specific market gradually, in a step by step manner.  

"Our game plan was to come up with an application that cuts through the noise and serves our target audience, the investment community, in a way that makes sense to them. The app eliminates the need for these readers to sift through reams of insignificant content that may otherwise waste their time,” Einhorn told Digital Journal.

He also hopes that their new app will encourage people to consider investing their money in shares and properties instead of just saving them in the bank.

The digital house hunt market

Undeniably, there are still people who do the traditional house hunting—driving around town to look for properties—but the number of buyers who would rather do the search via their smartphones and gadgets than spend a day driving and talking to brokers is increasing.

According to a 2013 study conducted by the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and Google, 89 percent of property hunters today use mobile search engine while 68 percent of which begin their search using a mobile app. In a follow-up study in 2014, NAR and Google found out that 27 percent of people found their homes through a mobile app. A separate consumer survey from Google also revealed that smartphones accounted for 27 percent of all searches related to buying a home, up by 19 percent from 2013. A Realtor Technology survey also said that 93 percent of realtors use smartphones for business, while a Fannie Mae study stated that most Americans are now getting used to completing mortgage application online via mobile phone apps.

These studies show that people are gradually embracing the mobile app trend in terms of buying, selling, and investing in a property. In the past few years, there have been left and right emergences of newer apps for real estate. Unfortunately, most of them are just mere copycats of existing apps, which just resulted to overcrowding in the space.

However, a New York startup decides to go against the flow.

Compass is currently shaking the real estate app market by doing something novel and groundbreaking: help users in easing the pain of dealing with brokers and eliminating time typically spent—or wasted—on duplicate listings. Last year, the company hired over 200 “star agents” to create a community of efficient brokers that will help property hunters make better decisions and faster search.

The company’s innovative idea has obtained a nod from the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, awarding the local firm the Mid-Sized Business of the Year. But Compass' unprecedented and fast rise to success was met with lawsuits from various companies accusing it of poaching talented brokers and agents. But, amid these accusations, Compass vowed to continue its work in making New York’s real estate industry a lot better and attractive to buyers. And there’s no point in entertaining these lawsuits, as some of their new employees were actually from Twitter and Google, two giant companies that did not even bother to express dismay.

"Across the real estate value chain—buyers, sellers, agents, developers, renters, et cetera—everyone is making decisions that have enormous financial ramifications, and the big secret is that no one is confident in making those decisions. We're building proprietary analytics technologies to help our agents triangulate the value of properties, develop property-specific marketing ROI plans, predict how the market will respond to new properties entering the market. We are bringing the science to what has for too long been only an art," Compass executive chairman Ori Allon told FastCompany.com.

Like Born2Invest, Compass is not interested in just becoming the “other real estate app” on the market. Indeed, what these companies offer are the two most important aspects missing from the segment. Born2Invest chooses to educate, while Compass decides to get rid of the red tape that has long been attached to property buying.

Of course, there are other brilliant apps for real estate like Homesnap Pro, SQFT, Trulia,  Doorsteps, and 3D Showcase, but rarely do we see emerging competitors that aren’t just pastiches of existing greats. Born2Invest and Compass may fall under the category “unconventional,” but their inclusion to the continuously expanding real estate app market is undeniably substantial.    

 

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Angelique Moss

angeliquemoss.realtytimes.com/

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