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The team that founded EasyKnock-acquired power buyer Ribbon is back with a new artificial intelligence-powered home transaction platform, Indigo, executives revealed to Inman exclusively on Thursday.
The platform centralizes agent-to-agent communications, contract and disclosure signings, buyer offers and negotiations for a more transparent buying and selling experience, said Indigo CEO and co-founder Shaival Shah.
Shaival Shah
“As an independent platform, we help all market participants – real estate agents, buyers, and sellers – by facilitating an open, transparent home transaction,” Shah said in a statement. “We believe this will be the new industry model. As the industry shifts from a search-centric to transaction-centric model, consumers and agents will demand a more accessible and intuitive experience.”
On the sell side, listing agents can create Storefronts for their listings. The storefronts pull listing information from multiple listing services and allow agents to add additional announcements, comparables and seller preferences on earnest money deposits, due diligence fees, due diligence end dates and preferred closing timelines. Storefronts take less than 10 minutes to set up.
Indigo Storefront
On the buy side, agents can use the platform to generate exclusive or non-exclusive written buyer agreements and craft offers that are automatically sent to the listing agent. As buyers’ agents make offers, Indigo organizes them into a streamlined dashboard so listing agents and clients can easily compare offers.
Indigo’s proprietary artificial intelligence model cuts the chaos associated with paperwork by generating contracts, disclosure forms, and addendums and organizing them into a workflow for listing and buyer agents. Indigo AI also auto-fills paperwork throughout each stage of the transaction, enabling agents to focus on other tasks for their clients.
Indigo Offer Dashboard
“To bring the new industry model to market, the information, real-time intelligence and decision-making capabilities must improve to facilitate the transparency the market deserves,” Shah said. “It requires great technical firepower to reimagine the new experience and workflow infrastructure.”
“Indigo’s proprietary AI models do just that – solving new and existing problems that were previously impossible,” he added. “In service of a more modern, transparent experience, we’re confident this is where we should be doubling down.”
In an interview with Inman, Shah said Indigo’s launch is perfect timing as the industry draws closer to the deadline for enforcing cooperative compensation policy changes per the National Association of Realtors’ buyer-broker commission settlement. The changes, he said, heighten the need for platforms that reduce friction and increase transparency while ensuring agents stay in compliance with the new rules.
“You know, we’ve spent a good five or six years operating and building products for agents and for buyers and for sellers in the past,” Shah said in reference to Ribbon. “We learned a lot of things from that. One of the things that we learned was just how complex the transaction process is. At one point, we were processing almost 5,000 offers a month.”
“Over the past year, we’ve been really focused on trying to address fundamental problems with the transaction process and how we could use really advanced technology to fix those problems,” he added. “When the lawsuit information started coming out, and we started to see the changes [happening], the platform and the technology that we were looking to build was very much aligned to the changes.”
Although Indigo is primarily a transaction management platform, he also sees the company as a portal since consumers can use Indigo as a home search platform. He said Indigo’s Storefront enables listing agents to “have a lot more control” than they would have with other portal incumbents, and curate a home search experience for consumers.
“It allows the listing agent to have a lot more control over that portal dynamic, right versus being run by a third party,” he said. “And so that way, the listing agent is able to present information that they think is appropriate that has been verified by their seller, versus a business automatically pulled in by third parties, and allows the listing agent and have more direct communication with anyone that’s interested. That’s how it’s different than a traditional search portal.”
Shah said a handful of leading real estate agents and teams from Compass, Keller Williams, eXp Realty, and RE/MAX have joined the platform, which launched in Charlotte, N.C. on Thursday. Indigo will be free to use until Oct. 1 and then introduce a “nominal fee” for listing and buyer agents who use the site.
Indigo will expand to several more markets by year’s end.
