The 1060 App is a short-form video app designed around home search and promotion for agents to promote themselves and their listings, and allow consumers and colleagues to search for homes.
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1060 is a short-form video listing portal and social media app.
Platforms: iOS, Android
Ideal for: Agents, teams, brokerages and real estate consumers
Top selling points:
- Authentic social media experience
- Tight, well-honed UI/UX
- Manual account verification
- Integration of traditional home search functionality
- Easy listing input
Top concern
The ability to connect home interest to existing databases. While the app can capture names and email upon reaching out about a home, it may need to find a more direct path between interested viewers and agent databases.
What you should know
1060 is best described, per the company’s founder, the offspring of Zillow and TikTok. It’s a short-form video app designed around home search and promotion. The intention is for agents to promote themselves and their listings, and allow consumers and colleagues to search for homes. Don’t expect text-heavy, ad-rich search result pages. Instead, 1060 delivers regionally based grid views that highlight regional listings and others its algorthim thinks a user may prefer. General use is similar to the TikTok and Instagram Reels experience.
All video is tough for agents to produce. The problem, as I’ve mentioned more times than I care to count, is that image-focused agents worry too much about production quality. They’re too afraid to be themselves. Remember, this is the industry that thinks headshots still matter.
1060 is surmounting this barrier by leaning its marketing toward the segment of residential real estate perfectly comfortable with pointing their phone at a home, and sometimes, at themselves. Specifically, the marketing-savvy and socially-aware, the agents who may, or be close to, leading their market. (I’ll let you make the connection.)
That is not to say the team behind the app is biased toward higher-end homes, it simply means it knows who is best suited to help the product grow as it enters the United States. (The app has been in use in its native Australia for some time.)
Agents have a short onboarding process that requires manual approval on the backend, and a brokerage email domain. This means addresses from Gmail and others won’t make the cut. This is to help ensure that the users take full ownership of what they post, in turn boosting content integrity. It also cuts down on spammers, sneaky content advertisers and half-committed users. The company knows that it can only survive if it publishes stuff people want to see.
A good deal of verification is automated, but I was assured that the company is aware of everyone who signs up to share listings.
1060 sharply integrates the fun and inspiration of seeing what people can do with a house and the practical, business use case of finding your next home. It is, after all, a search portal first.
Users can input all the common methods to find a listing. Agent name. City. Neighborhood. Size. Beds. Bath — all that stuff, and even hashtags. The algorithm will prioritize results according to what you input, but does drop in listings in a few places it knows you’re a little curious about.
Listing input is quick, as the app only needs a few details to populate the icons that hover over the video, which can be shot at that moment or uploaded later.
Those browsing homes can like, share and comment, as well as peruse an agent’s sold and rental listings, if applicable. (Hint: leasing agents could learn to love this app.)
The scrolling experience is as you expect from a full-screen video app. Icons and commands are placed in each corner to navigate advanced features, and the property window, bottom left, opens each home’s listing page for still photos and more details.
Users can follow agents, and vice versa, and whenever a person publishes a new video, all followers get active, in-app alerts. 1060 also uses a direct chat tool for people to quickly respond to each other.
There’s a trending feed, which includes homes you’ve browsed to in previous sessions, and the ability for agents to add accessory videos, 15-second snippets on an standout home amenity or to be used as a little self-promotion.
The app incorporates a nice call to action by including showing times, which is under the “inspect” button, the Australian term. Home shoppers and agents can select an time to notify the agent, who is alerted via email.
My hope is that this feature eventually finds its way to integrate with a formal showing coordination product, to at least start the process of becoming part of a larger marketing vertical. Albeit slowly.
That not being the case now in no way takes away from 1060; in fact, during our demo there was a lot of positive energy on the idea that less is more in proptech development. The best feature, I was told, is no feature, and I can name countless products in our collective space that can be drastically improved by removing components.
The company has no intention of weighing down its app with superfluous features, instead leaning on its current iteration until adoption rates climb and remain consistent. It’s a smart way to ensure new users six months from now have as easy an onboarding process as today’s users. This strategy also helps current users remain engaged as they get up to pace and become regular content providers.
1060 is gaining momentum here by partnering with a number of reality show types and big city top producers. It’s a proven strategy, and the best way to capture buyers, sellers and general fans of real estate.
As I said on our call, real estate may be local, but content is universal. Everyone understands how to swipe on a phone, but not everyone knows how to make doing that fun and beneficial to business.
I put 1060 in the category of social search. They’re not the first to do it, as Yaza and ReplayListings have been at it here for a couple of years. But the former seems unmotivated to scale and the latter is saddled to New York City listings.
I’m wondering why Zillow didn’t see this years ago, given its access to the nation’s listing data and its ability to get in front of home shoppers. But maybe, given its recent tilt toward product development, something like this is burrowing out of its skunk-works department. Who knows?
Meanwhile, Real has more of an agent-to-agent approach, but I think Courted has already succeeded in that.
I really think 1060 has spanned that divide between a common-sense business app and the urge to scroll into people’s living rooms and primary bathrooms. It’s fast, lightweight and its timing appears to be ideal.
With the market in full shift, agents have the time, and need, to showcase listings in a new environment.
If you’re up for showing your seller something different, and maybe growing tired of Reels or not yet up-to-date on TikTok, then don’t scroll past 1060.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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