The boom in real estate technologies over the past few years has been undeniable — from proptech and digital twins to iBuying and beyond. We sat down with Fayyad Sbaihat, President of Supra to understand how the company is using technology to shape the future for their 1 million+ eKEY® app subscribers across North America.
Q: Supra got its start in hardware over 65 years ago. Talk to us about how the business has evolved.
Today, we’re more of a software company than a hardware company. In fact, we’ve transitioned 100% of our customers from hardware keys to digital access keys. We have a relentless focus on creating an ecosystem that offers easy access, plus value-added tools and technologies that empower today’s agents.
Q: Many real estate technologies are disrupting the traditional agent-client relationship. What is Supra’s vision for tech-enabled solutions?
Real estate professionals are our collaborators, not our competitors. While digital entrants and iBuying services have given consumers more ways to search and ‘enter the process,’ real estate professionals are still the real superheroes in the business. No technology can replace their intuition, expertise, and guidance. If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, I’m betting you’d agree.
Our vision for an integrated Supra ecosystem is leading us down new paths for service that help agents and brokerages offer more compelling experiences for their clients. We want to deliver tools and technologies that help agents, support them, and make their lives easier. If we help simplify the process work, they can focus on the people work. We’re successful if they are successful.
Q: BrokerBay recently became part of Supra. What was interesting to you about their offering and how is it pushing Supra’s offering forward?
This integration is a great example of our commitment to putting tools and technologies in the hands of agents and it was a natural extension of Supra’s services.
Organizations, brokerages, and agents demanded a more modern and integrated showing management solution, as these are some of their most time-consuming and tedious tasks. We saw a great fit where BrokerBay’s user-friendly ecosystem could power new Supra offerings, not just for associations and their members, but also for brokerages.
Today, organizations representing nearly 200,000 real estate professionals have adopted our new Showing Management solution, and now it’s the second-largest and fastest-growing. But, what we have today is only the beginning — we’re excited about what’s to come.
Q: What are three areas of innovation that could fuel the next chapter of Supra?
First, we’re going to continue to expand our ecosystem — innovating in ways that can empower agents, brokerages, and organizations and improve their productivity. We’ve heard a lot about pain points like document management, offer management, and other productivity stressors. Those are all things we’re listening to very closely.
Second, there’s the opportunity to offer greater business intelligence to real estate professionals. We see a future where we’re able to combine activity from Supra subscribers with market trend data to provide actionable insights around listings. For brokerages, we could offer insight into team productivity and performance. Again, all tools that empower our users to create the most value possible for their clients.
Lastly, with the transformation of homes becoming smarter, we’re exploring leveraging the smart lock expertise and success of our sister company Onity, a global leader in hotel access solutions. The framework is there to reshape Supra’s access methodology by seamlessly integrating smart home technology.
Over our history, we’ve disrupted our own business many times over. We’ve carved the turn for the industry — advancing solutions beyond just traditional access. We’re looking to do that again now.
Learn more about new Supra solutions.