Zipi, a financial management software solution for brokers, and SkySlope, a popular transaction management platform, have partnered in the creation of a real estate business application called SkyZip.
The app’s intent is provide a single sign-on solution for real estate brokers to administer transactions and oversee their subsequent financial details.
The fully digital approach will help brokers further their efforts to streamline and coalesce disparate transaction steps. Only Zipi customers can access the app, and it works only in conjunction with SkySlope. It is available in the Zipi marketplace and free to existing users.
Jesse Garcia, CEO of Zipi, told Inman in an email that the app is largely a proof of concept, and it demonstrates what lies ahead for the multifaceted software company.
“We designed it the same way a third party developer could build on our platform,” Garcia said. “Everything we did for that is available on our Open API, we did it as a proof of concept to show developers what can be done with our API.”
The company is essentially demonstrating how its financial management tools can cooperate with a number of a different platforms via the API.
Instead of software products periodically synchronizing or having data manually imported or exported, SkyZip is bidirectional, meaning the data flows freely between the two applications.
In essence, Zipi has built a two-way bridge between the systems and wants to encourage other real estate transaction and business oversight solutions to do the same.
“We encourage an open ecosystem where technology partners work together and data flows freely for the benefit of real estate brokers, agents and consumers,” Garcia wrote.
SkySlope is the No. 1 transaction management platform for 65 percent of the top 20 largest brokerages in the nation, according to the release. It was acquired by Fidelity National Financial in 2017.
Application Program Interfaces, or APIs, have dramatically increased in the past several years as an avenue to help software products interact with another.
In the case of SkyZip, Zipi’s API allows both systems to work from the same financial data, critical to ensuring transaction information is in sync with its corresponding economics and vice versa.
It also allows brokers and office managers to work confidently from a single series of dashboards and screens, as opposed to manually shifting back and forth or waiting on data synchronization.
Zipi is aiming to expand the availability of its API to build more custom applications for other industry products.
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