Competition is always a good thing for a home sale, but it often remains under the surface, communicated through vague messaging without specific numbers.
States vary on the legality of it and which party has to give permission for prices to be disclosed. On top of that, some agents aren’t super comfortable with it.
Australian online offer management company Market Buy, however, is totally comfortable with it, and has more than enough Down Under industry recognition to prove it, among others:
- Finalist for the REIQ Awards for Excellence, 2002
- Winner, REIV Awards for Excellence, 2017, 2018
- Finalist, REIV Awards for Excellence, 2019
- Finalist, REB Women in Real Estate Awards for Innovator of the Year, 2019
- Finalist, REIA Innovation award, 2019
- Elite Agent Magazine, Top 50 Industry Influencers, 2018
Dave Stewart and John Hellaby from Market Buy came to Inman Connect New York to further explore the viability of their product here in the United States, leveraging the wide selection of attendants to gain perspectives on their product.
The company recently signed a brokerage from Atlanta. Agent Blake Wallace of National Realty Guild in Minneapolis closed to two sales while beta testing.
Listing agents start the process by inviting interested buyer reps to the offer page, say, after a showing or some other form of expressed interest.
Not an auction site, Market Buy merely publishes in sequence the price of every offer a listing receives, one after the next, higher and higher.
Buyer’s agents submit their clients’ offers directly on the listing page, which uses Market Buy’s user experience. Everything about the process is openly disclosed to each party, and no contingencies are shared, only the price.
Trumped offers get crossed out but remain visible, and buyer names are replaced with “A,” “B” and so on.
Agents, in cooperation with their sellers, can pause sales to garner more enthusiasm from offering parties and use the software to create “hype” around the listing going live and also set a deadline for the offer period to end.
In many of the country’s tight sales markets, tools like Market Buy could earn sellers tremendous attention — and prices — on their homes.
Once an offer is accepted, buyer agents can download an offer document directly from the Market Buy page and are encouraged to submit within 24 hours. But, standard practice suggests the buyer would want their offer in writing and to the seller as soon as possible.
Also, an agent can monitor an ever-climbing offer battle and swoop in at the last minute with the highest bid, but it still comes down to who gets the paperwork to the seller the fastest.
The company believes that transparency makes everything better, and that given how much data consumers have before entering the market, why not be as transparent as possible about the offer situation, too?
Market Buy, built from the mobile environment up, has been running for four years in Australia, where there is no buyer agency. Thus, it had to adapt its software to accommodate America’s model.
The company’s hope is that once agents get over their initial, and in its opinion, largely misplaced fear of disclosing offers, buyers and sellers will appreciate knowing exactly where they stand in the deal.
The company’s platform was used to facilitate Australia’s a record for the largest residential online sale, an 8,000-acre ranch.
Market Buy is one of several Australian prop tech companies roaming the halls of the Marriott Marquis in New York City’s Times Square, seeking feedback and insight from the event’s collective real estate expertise.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
