“Developed in collaboration with leading brokerages, franchisors, and multiple listing service (MLS) providers, Rayse has garnered significant industry support. “We believe in shared ownership of technology solutions to benefit both real estate professionals and their clients,” said Howard W. “Hoby” Hanna IV, CEO of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services, an early investor in Rayse. Founding investors in Rayse completed over 1.1 million transactions in 2023, and the combined agent count among brokers and MLSs is over 470,000, according to data provided by T3 Sixty.”
What I appreciate about what James Dwiggins has so far done with Rayse is the shear number of industry participants who have invested real money to launch this new venture. The count of industry investors he has put together is amazing. It lessens the burden of having to rely on one or two big checks and also has the advantage of smart money. If you take a look at the list of people/companies that have invested they are the same people that can actively participate in helping the company succeed. And when Rayse does succeed they all can participate in its success. Love, love love.
Listing Bits is back with a great guest, Kevin Shtofman, Global Head of Innovation at Cherre. Cherre is a global real estate data management platform. Kevin is from Texas and comes from a very entrepreneurial family that owned retail stores selling western wear, including honest-to-goodness cowboy boots! Yee-haw! Kevin talks about his journey from Wall Street back to Dallas and Cherre. It’s a great conversation where we dive into the breadth of real estate data available now, housing affordability, real estate myths, and the changing vendor landscape. Kevin is a super smart guy, and I found this conversation very insightful—I know you will too.
“This week’s Stratechery Interview is with new Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. Wacksman is a long-time Zillow employee, having joined the company in 2009, three years after its founding. We also have a lot in common, including working at Microsoft after an MBA at Kellogg (we went in rather different directions since then!). Wacksman was previously COO of Zillow, and before that was CMO.”
Ben Thompson is the founder of Stratechery, which is one of my favorite technology blogs. Ben had previously interviewed Zillow co-founder and former CEO, Rich Barton. Barton has cited Ben’s writing about Opendoor as one of the reasons Zillow went in to iBuying. I would recommend listening to the interview via the Stratechery podcast. Access might require a subscription, which I highly recommend.
This is a great interview and really covers a lot of subjects including Jeremy’s background, Zillow’s early history, its business model evolution, its launch and then quick exit out of iBuying. But these three sections caught my attention. First is his thoughts his “pitch” on their upcoming “Super App”
“Well, give the Super App pitch. What is the overarching strategy, the shift away being an ads business to what you’re doing today?
JW: Yeah, the Super App pitch is that if I could give you a remote control on your phone so that the same way you can order an Uber or book an Airbnb, you could do all of your real estate transaction inside of the Zillow app. You could talk to your loan officer and your agent 24/7 via group chat. You could understand via a pizza tracker where your loan is and are you missing any documents and it could all be in one place.”
I have some thoughts on this I’ll save for a later post.
The other is about the impact of the NAR Settlement.
Give us the overview, you’re the expert.
“JW: The two high level changes are both about buyer and seller choice and education. …..So in both cases, on the seller side, on the buyer side, it’s a more empowered customer, and it’s a more educated customer and we can come back to what we’re doing, we’re leaning into that education. On the buy side, we are innovating a touring agreement, like a dating form because we want to help educate customers before they get married to an agent. Well, what are you going to get into? What should you expect? What should a contract look like? And help them be informed about their choice before they make it, so that’s what changing.”
I like the analogy of a “dating form”.
And lastly on the fate of the MLS.
“JW: Our argument is again, we’re here for the customer and there is some real good in this marketplace and you can build a lot of good and we can grow our company really big in a world where there is listing sharing and there are all these benefits and all these things we are doing to grow our company to — you’d move back to a classified business model which isn’t really good for the buyer and the seller. So that’s the big part of why we’re like — but it was this weird argument where we’re talking to investors about like, “Well, yeah, the margin profile of that business might look better, Zillow would probably win more, but we don’t actually think that’s good”, it’s not really good for anyone. It’s definitely not even good for the suppliers who would in theory, enact it.”
“At SIMLS, our subscribers serve a diverse set of clients, and we are committed to providing innovative tools that empower them to make homeownership a possibility for more people,” said Sandy Krueger, President and CEO of Staten Island Multiple Listing Service. “We couldn’t be more excited about our partnership with DirectOffer. DO AudioTour’s multi-language and closed captioning capabilities ensure that our subscribers’ property listings are reaching the broadest audience, while supporting our ADA and DEI initiatives.”
Sandy Krueger, President and CEO of Staten Island Multiple Listing Service
“This is the end result of that extensive research; a platform that goes beyond integrations, beyond connections, beyond a rebrand to create a real solution. From a single login to a modular design that allows real estate professionals to pick and choose the solutions they need, with shared data workflows that keep information consistent from lead to close and the latest in digital security, there’s nothing like this in the industry today—and it will transform the way real estate professionals work, now and into the future.”
Sean Wheeler, CTO of Lone Wolf Technologies
This has been a huge project and I’m loving what Lone Wolf has pulled off. Having acquired some of the most popular and widely adopted software in the real estate space, they have taken a fresh approach on how to create an end-to-end platform. Am I biased? Of course! It’s all because I know the team there is made up some of the most creative and talented people in the industry, people from HomeSpotter, Instanet, zipForm, Terradatum and W+R Studios.
I hear some of you say, “But, Greg, I thought you didn’t like all-in-one solutions?” I think that Lone Wolf’s CEO Jimmy Kelly said it best, “Real Estate Doesn’t Need More Software“. In a nutshell what he is saying real estate has a lot of point solutions; it needs what it already has to pull more weight. The industry wants its existing software to work together, and be more automated. What Lone Wolf is doing is creating a foundation (see what I did there) for their software (and also giving the flexibility to add other solutions) to let brokers and agents create the experience they want. Experience I believe is the key word here.
“Companies accepted to the 2024 REACH program are as follows:
Chirpyest(link is external): a social commerce marketplace that empowers real estate professionals to earn cash back when they shop and share their curated finds.
Final Offer(link is external): a consumer-facing, agent-driven negotiation platform for residential real estate, delivering clear, real-time offer alerts to all interested parties.
Kukun(link is external): a real estate data, analytics and applications platform for homeowners and the industries that serve them.
Notable(link is external): simple pay-at-close financing for everything a client needs to prep their home for sale and get the most out of it.
Purlin(link is external): AI tools that convert client conversations into transactions by simplifying business dealings among real estate agents and settlement service providers.
Scout(link is external): helping agents find and engage homeowners with AI-driven automated personalized email outreach.
Trackxi(link is external): a collaborative deal and task tracker for real estate agents, teams, clients and consumers.
Unlock(link is external): helping consumers unlock the power of home equity without interest charges or monthly payments.”
NAR REACH
No small feat. Out of 1000+ companies considered, 100+ applications, Trackxi is among the final 8 companies chosen for this great opportunity. Congrats to Vijay and his team! Good things ahead!
“In this new role, Starchild will now lead all of iGo’s business units, excluding iGo Academy, and will oversee Marketing, B2B Sales, Human Resources, Customer Service and Onboarding. She will continue to report to iGo Co-Founder and CEO John Russell, who will direct his efforts to drive the company’s strategy and revenue. Starchild’s promotion is the next step in iGo’s evolution to support the recent growth and rapid expansion of the company.”
InspectionGo
I’ve always been a big fan of Celeste. This news made my day. Congrats!
Pretty cool. A different approach from apps and screens. I know some people that have ditched their iPhones to flip phones just to get away from so many distractions. When I first saw a demo I was wondering what real estate use cases could be implemented and I made the mock up below.
One thing I’ve discovered about myself is that I really enjoy the beginning phase of starting a company. Building a team, fleshing out the idea of a product, branding, positioning, pricing, billing, go to market, etc. Once that part is done is more of a matter of managing and optimizing (which I kind of like too). That’s why I always enjoy talking to new vendors, hearing their ideas, and if I like the idea/founder seeing if I can match them with the right people.
That’s exactly why I’m started working as an advisor with Trackxi. Trackxi is a deal tracker software solution for agents, teams and transaction coordinators, it also so has light CRM. It’s more a project management solution than a “transaction manager”, it doesn’t have any MLS integration or does it incorporate forms natively. In that way it’s a very opinionated piece of software. Trackxi is pre-loaded with deal workflows (tracks?) that agents can share with their clients and other people involved in the deal. It has a kind of “pizza tracker” data viz element that clients can view to see what tasks have currently been completed, what tasks are in progress, and tasks that haven’t been started. Which I think will be great for buyer’s agents showing their value.
You can use Trackxi to track pretty much anything. One client used it to plan her wedding. I think beyond tracking deals you can make templates like “First 90 days as a real estate agent”, “Kick start your real estate business.” , etc.
Another reason I’m working with Trackxi is their co-founder Vijay Gopalswamy. Vijay lives in Portland, Oregon and is bootstrapping the company. Vijay started as an agent and later a broker team leader and Trackxi was born from some of the lessons he learned with starting that team. Vijay is a pretty humble guy and has an interesting background. I interviewed him on Listing Bits that I will share later today.
I’m actually not sure what being an “advisor” really means. But I am having super fun working with Vijay; brainstorming messaging, positioning and company strategy. Our hope is that these discussions and work translate to getting Trackxi available to more agents. To find out more about Trackxi please visit their website here.
Next week Lone Wolf Technologies will reveal its new platform at the T3 Technology Summit, and I’m super excited about it. Why? Let me tell you a story.
At W+R Studios we were bootstrapped, so we needed to grow organically. Our product strategy centered around making core features of an MLS system better.
CMAs on MLS systems suck? Let’s make a better one. Enter Cloud CMA.
MLS system’s client portals and listing alert emails are ugly. Let’s make them pretty (and easier to use). Voilà , Cloud Streams.
Searching on MLS systems too complicated? Let’s make something simple. Boom, Cloud MLX!
The problem was two fold. In order to grow we needed to add new products (more software) and at the end of the day is that we had 3 different software apps, each of them great in their own right, but they didn’t really work together. Also if you wanted all three you had to buy each one separately, and have 3 separate logins, and 3 separate onboarding scenarios, 3 different times you entered a credit card number, and 3 separate…you get the point.
We solved most of this by creating the “Cloud Agent Suite“, but really only scratched the surface of what was possible, then we were acquired in December 2020.
So this problem of “simplifying real estate” has been on the minds of our (W+R) design team for a very long time. How do we bring all of this together to create an end to end solution that makes sense, and still grow? Can “less software” be the answer?
Turns that the problem was about to get bigger. Starting in 2020 Lone Wolf acquired 5 companies in 9 months (including W+R); HomeSpotter, LionDesk, Terradatum and Propertybase. Now you had 9 (at least) separate logins, 9 separate… you get the point.
Sean Wheeler, CTO Lone Wolf
When I left Lone Wolf I was starting to see the green shoots of this work. Most of it on the backend led by Sean Wheeler, Lone Wolf’s CTO. One login, one credit card, one database of contacts for all products, etc. Jimmy Kelly, Lone Wolf’s CEO, talked about their effort and the concept of “less software” on a post on Inman News titled “Real Estate Doesn’t Need More Software“. I was also privy to see some of the earlier mock ups from the design group, which were super impressive.
Jimmy Kelly, CEO Lone Wolf
But, like any good meal it all comes down to ingredients. Lone Wolf from my estimation has the best ingredients in the market. The products they acquired (and the teams behind them) are not only best of class but have high adoption rates and great partnerships. Now it comes down to presentation and taste. And I have full confidence in the design chops of the team behind this. I had a chance to interview, Damien Huze, who was W+R’s Chief Design Officer and now a principal designer at Lone Wolf on my Listing Bits podcast which should drop this week.
Damien Huze, Principal Designer Lone Wolf
Am I biased? Absolutely. Am I still a fan of simple focused software applications? You betcha. But I’m a bigger fan of people. So I look forward to seeing how this particular group of talented people proves less software is better.
