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In September 2012, Inman publisher Brad Inman laid out his vision for the real estate industry: Make buying a home as easy as purchasing a latte at Starbucks.
More than a decade later, has that vision become a reality? Decidedly not, but it’s closer, according to panelists at Inman Connect Las Vegas on Thursday.
In a session called “Will There Ever Be a Finish Line? The Race to the End-to-End Technology Platform,” moderator Clelia Peters, managing partner of Era Ventures; Curt Beardsley, vice president of industry development at Zillow; and David Voorhees, executive director of Labs at Keller Williams, reflected on the goal of achieving a seamless end-to-end residential real estate transaction for consumers.
“It is a complicated thing to fix, but there have been massive improvements along the way,” Beardsley told attendees.
“We’re not there,” he added. “I’d say that we can we make a pretty damn good cup of coffee right now, but we may not be able to get a latte. But that is on the horizon.”
Voorhees agreed. “I don’t know that we’re quite there yet, but we’re getting close.”
Peters was more blunt. “I think we’re definitely not there,” she said, laughing. Then she asked, who is the industry building for in this context?
“At Zillow, our focus has always been the consumer,” Beardsley said. “But we know from talking to consumers, that they want professionals in the market. So in order to make consumers’ lives better, we have to make the process of their connections with those agents better. And that ties directly into their consumer experience.”
Beardsley said Zillow’s Rental Manager tool provides a “glimmer of hope” that piecing together different parts of a transaction “can be extremely powerful.” That tool allows consumers to input all of their credit information, get fully qualified, share their information with different property managers, do their lease within the tool, set up their bank information and pay their landlord.
“We’ve seen that begin to be a true end-to-end platform in rentals,” Beardsley said. “Residential real estate purchases are more complicated.There’s more pieces, more things involved, but you can see how much better that makes the consumers’ life and the professionals’ life and that environment gives us hope to do that.”
But Peters pushed back, saying she’s looked at a lot of different rental facilitation tools and platforms and “I think it’s still actually pretty piece-y” with “a bunch different solutions that exist at different points.”
Beardsley noted that, on Zillow, a consumer can search, connect to an agent, arrange a showing, and connect to loan officer, but what they really want is “real-time availability” to see properties and that’s where it starts to get “a little bumpy.”
“We’re still building some of those pieces out,” he said.
Voorhees said that for Keller Williams, the agent is the customer, and its Command platform allows for end-to-end transactions. “I feel like we’re there from an agent’s perspective,” he said.
Artificial intelligence will be a “game changer” when it comes to putting the pieces of a transaction together, according to Beardsley.
“AI like a super smart assistant” that will help agents “spend more time with consumers” and offer them a more seamless transaction instead of dealing with disparate data, which brokers will also ultimately benefit from, he said.
“That process sits within the brokerage environment, so having a better process that is well defined and actually organized actually helps the broker as well,” Beardsley said.
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