Listings from Arizona-based residential brokerage My Home Group’s more than 2,000 agents will now appear on the decentralized Imbrex real estate marketplace platform, company executives announced Tuesday.
With 8,000 listings in eight major markets, big growth numbers have been standard operating procedure for My Home Group. The opportunities presented by the blockchain-based platform means it can now tackle emerging obstacles, according to the company’s chief creative officer Aaron Pierson.
With My Home Group’s 8,000 listed properties, its addition will bring the total number of Imbrex listings to 10,925, an Imbrex spokesperson said.
“A challenge that we have in growing and expanding is trying to integrate with dozens of MLSs in all these states,” Pierson told Inman. “It’s a part of the industry that really hasn’t changed much in the past few years.”
In July, Imbrex changed its name from RexMLS and launched almost a year after its initial coin offering, which helped raise money for the platform. The startup is using the Ethereum-based tokens it released during the ICO as a system within its platform, rewarding agents who post listings with Imbrex coins, but its main innovations are in real estate data.
Beside allowing agents to post listings on Imbrex, the startup also offers its blockchain real estate data management system. Without as much human capital required to manage data flow — blockchain’s distributed nature allows it to lower costs. And instead of firms handing over their data to a third-party platform like Amazon Web Services, the data lives on the blockchain, where a middleman can’t access it.
Pierson also believes the blockchain can modernize the way data is controlled by individual agents, and it’s a change, he said, that’s inevitably headed to the real estate industry.
“I think that the person who is working with the customer, the listing agent, it’s their data. They’re working hard for it. They should be able to pass that through to anyone that they choose or not,” Pierson said.
He hopes that My Home Group’s move will inspire others, he added.
With what the blockchain has to offer its agents, clients and our partners, Pierson thinks the industry’s shift is going to happen maybe over the next three to five years, but he wants to be in on it right now.
