One of the most highly anticipated new showing management platforms went live Tuesday when SentriLock announced that its SentriKey offering is now available to the company’s existing customers.
The platform, officially called SentriKey Showing Service, was designed using input from real estate professionals and is meant to help them organize and coordinate the way they show properties, according to a statement from SentriLock. Among other things, the tool provides users with market data, scheduling options, a virtual assistant dubbed SAM, a client roster and listing sharing options.
SentriLock itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), and is well-known in the industry for its ability to give agents access to lockboxes. SentriKey incorporates that technology and will also allow users to access lockboxes.
Bob Goldberg
In a statement Tuesday, NAR CEO Bob Goldberg said competition “benefits consumers” and that SentriKey represents a “significant opportunity” for members of the real estate industry.
“Moving forward, NAR will continue working to find new and innovative ways to ensure Realtors have every tool at their disposal to enhance their businesses and best serve their clients,” Goldberg added.
As of Tuesday, SentriKey is available to anyone who currently uses SentriLock. It will additionally become available as a standalone product to multiple listing services (MLSs) and Realtor organizations in the third quarter of this year.
SentriKey’s launch comes at a pivotal time for the showing management sector. For years, the industry standard for showing platforms was ShowingTime. However, in February Zillow announced that it was acquiring the company for $500 million. Though Zillow said at the time that it would keep ShowingTime’s policies related to things like privacy in place, the acquisition still faced backlash from some agents who said they didn’t want the online portal to have their data.
Days later, a handful of upstart showing management providers told Inman they were seeing a tsunami of interest, including from brokerages and MLSs that were searching for alternatives to ShowingTime. And though the space has grown increasingly crowded since the ShowingTime acquisition, SentriLock’s established track record and industry penetration has made its showing management technology among the buzziest of the emergent options.
In Tuesday’s statement, SentriLock founder and CEO Scott Fisher said the company leveraged its “real estate expertise, technology platform and world-class customer support” when building SentriKey.
“Now that the service is available to customers, we’ve been overwhelmed by the positive response,” Fisher added. “The convergence of lockbox access, showing technology and experience management software all on the same platform is the future state of the technology — and we are proud to offer it now.”