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RealCheeky is a tech-enabled transaction coordination service.
Platforms: Browser
Ideal for: Growing agents, small teams and brokerages
Top selling points:
- Agent-founded
- Document error scanning
- Highly automated backend
- Technology and employee collaboration
- Flexible; variable deal types
Top concern:
Communication is the most central tenet of good deal management, and while the software used internally does a good job of keeping company staff and agent-users on track, I’d like to see more overt outreach directly to buyers and sellers, as opposed to mainly relying on agents to keep them informed. Nevertheless, no details are left to chance.
What you should know:
RealCheeky helps agents manage transactions from contract to close using on-staff transaction coordinators and its proprietary deal management software. While agents log in to upload listing documents and offers, they won’t interact with the software to the same extent they might while using other systems for this purpose. RealCheeky has highly detailed checklists, OCR-based (optical character recognition) form error detection, closing plan timelines and automations powered by contextual logic, meaning fields and input options adjust according to deal type, etc. A common example is the automatic inclusion of a lead paint addendum for a listing built before 1978.
To the agent, RealCheeky isn’t necessarily a daily login. It’s a service provider that uses technology to deliver its product after all pertinent paperwork is submitted. Thus, RealCheeky really sells trust.
The company has to ensure its clients are consistently informed of a deal’s status and never burdened by internal glitches or bugs that could upset the deal flow. To further hedge against that, RealCheeky employs its own transaction coordinators to oversee the technology’s role.
That trust comes from text, email or phone outreach if necessary, but relies mostly on the software doing its job. Internal checks and balances are key in that respect, and the company processes every document uploaded for missing fields and pertinent data. This feature is most effective for documents uploaded after being manually completed and scanned, or from document management tools not-specific to real estate.
RealCheeky accepts completed document packages from Dotloop and zipForms, but errors are tough to make within those products. ZipForm is owned by Lone Wolf, which has one of the industry’s most advanced, enterprise-level transaction management solutions.
For executing documents, RealCheeky integrates with DocuSign, which sends buyers and sellers its standard envelope of disclosures and deal addenda to complete and securely send back. Most agents, and consumers, will be comfortable with this workflow.
Current deals are easy to track via a simple spreadsheet-inspired look and feel with dates enacted, prices, buyer and seller names, year built and other basic information. The Actions tab launches an edit feature, sends an email and offers a quick jump into the transaction.
RealCheeky’s Closing Plan is an extensive list of what’s needing to be done upon agreement, customized for offers and listings, and is sent typically to the agent within 24 hours after the documents have been processed into the system. It includes all the vital milestones, such as loan application verification, when earnest money is due, and when the title report is expected.
This is one spot, of a few, where the company runs into challenges when compared to more comprehensive transaction management systems in the industry. RealCheeky’s requirement to upload and process third-party deal forms puts it at a disadvantage to native, in-app documentation workflows, which can generate checklists and timelines dynamically, and do so in direct, user-facing experience based on state laws. They can link to MLS and brokerage data for fast listing input, directly connect to mortgage partners and disseminate emails to clients every time a box is checked or a milestone is reached.
In a video on RealCheeky’s website, it uses an argument that many of today’s transaction systems are disjointed, needing to pull data from multiple, out-of-reach sources. That’s simply not true. At all. Transaction management solutions — like Mevi, Jointly and Shaker — are more vertically integrated than ever, and getting even better. I suppose I’m more concerned with RealCheeky’s attempt to sell against its competition without realizing it’s not even in the same race.
Again, what RealCheeky sells is outsourced transaction management, not transaction management software.
In that respect, it does a good job. It can remove the burden from the agent of getting deals through escrow. Terrific. That’s important. And it’s an ideal play for lower volume offices and the individual agent or small team not interested in adopting larger-scale software products.
There is space in the field for RealCheeky. I’m confident about that. It’s affordable and pays its ante.
The company is young and still has time to analyze the market. I feel it may have been built within the vacuum of its founders’ frustration without really delving into what it might be selling against.
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.
