RESAAS, the fast-growing, free social network designed to help licensed real estate agents facilitate referrals and connect, has launched a marketplace where its thousands of users can purchase software and services for their businesses at a discount.
At launch, the marketplace includes offerings from approximately a dozen firms, includes the transaction management companies dotloop and DocuSign, customer relationship management provider Contactually and email-marketing platform BombBomb.
Companies interested in joining the store must apply to RESAAS and meet some basic requirements, including the offer of discounts to RESAAS users and the willingness to pay the firm a referral fee on sales they make on the platform.
RESAAS hand-selects firms for the marketplace that real estate pros find useful, said Tom Rossiter, president of RESAAS. RESAAS vets each applicant with input from RESAAS users, he said.
Rossiter says RESAAS is close to rolling out a complementary feature of the marketplace, an application programming interface (aka “API”) that marketplace firms can embed in their products that will give RESAAS users the ability to automatically share with their RESAAS community the actions they take while using those firms’ products.
The RESAAS Marketplace is the 5-year-old firm’s second revenue-generating product. In July, it rolled out AdSAAS, which allows firms that provide services to the real estate industry to buy ads that show up in and next to RESAAS’ Facebook-like news feed. Firms can also use AdSAAS to manage ads on other platforms like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.
RESAAS, which began powering a global multilanguage, multicurrency referral network for global franchise giant Re/Max in March, doesn’t reveal how many agents are on the platform.
But the number is likely high given that RESAAS also powers private networks for real estate brokerages, associations and organizations — including Orange County, California-based The Boutique Real Estate Group, the Asian Real Estate Association of America (AREAA) and the Fox Valley (Illinois) Association of Realtors — for free.
That’s one way the company has grown the number of agents on the platform. When a group signs up, those agents can also participate in the at-large RESAAS network. Agents can also sign up for RESAAS individually.
Other firms, too, are focused on building referral networks for the digital age. Balcony, which is close to a beta launch, allows agents to vet potential referral partners, track deals and get paid.
