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RealScout’s 10 Year Anniversary

A decade ago, at the early stages of the venture capital boom that fueled the unicorn startup craze, my cofounder Michael and I began working late nights in a dinky office, our ambitions both limitless and naive. As a practicing real estate agent at the time, I knew that the industry was ripe for innovation, and we were determined to be at the forefront. That was the genesis of RealScout.

Of course, the challenges in the years ahead, unpredictable and daunting, tested our resilience and patience. Naturally, it’s this path behind us, littered with failures big and small, that led us to where we are today.
But this retrospective isn’t about how “despite all odds, we persevered and succeeded.” It’s about how 10 years on, where we ended up — and where we’re going — is so much more meaningful and valuable than where we ever dreamed we’d be.

And it’s about how grateful we are to everyone for helping us get here. Here are the stories of three people, among countless many, that helped define what RealScout is today.

Adriana Plut, Customer #1

Not long after we started our long nights in the tiny office, local Silicon Valley agent Adriana Plut unexpectedly became RealScout customer #1. It was unexpected because we met Adriana well before we had the operations ready to take on customers. Yet, during an early prototype feedback session, Adriana pulled out her checkbook (literally!) to ask how she could sign up. She saw, ahead of everyone else, that taking responsibility for her clients’ online experience was critical to her business, and she took a chance on a couple of unknown entrepreneurs. That vote of confidence was the validation we needed to complete the v1 product; that product, which to this day, is at the core of every RealScout user’s experience.

Brad Inman, Community Builder

Another game-changing opportunity was given to us by none other than Brad Inman, who let us pitch our platform during the “New Kids on the Block” segment at Inman Connect. RealScout back then was a hyperlocal solution for only a small portion of the SF Bay Area, with years of work ahead of us to become a national solution relevant for the broader Inman audience. Yet Brad saw something in RealScout and gave us a chance to introduce ourselves to the industry. That was the start of many meaningful relationships with members of the Inman community and it instilled in us the importance of delivering thoughtful, informative content when speaking to the real estate audience. As young entrepreneurs, these words (and Brad’s continued support) fueled us in times of uncertainty.

Phil Cantrell, Early Buyer Graph Champion

Third was Phil Cantrell, a fiercely independent thinker who founded Benchmark Realty in Nashville and grew it into a powerhouse that inspires brokerages across the country. Phil is not known for chasing trends and jumping on bandwagons, so we were absolutely thrilled when he embraced the importance of the Buyer Graph initiatives back in April of 2019. Buyer Graph initiatives allow brokerages and their agents to share anonymized demand data on RealScout, providing market transparency for agents and clients. It was Phil’s confidence in this model that led to the success of the Nashville Buyer Graph and the other 18 Buyer Graphs (and counting) around the country.

Adriana, Brad, and Phil were just three of many in the real estate industry who listened to us, resonated with our vision, and took a chance on us. As entrepreneurs — but also simply as people passionate about an idea — there is no better, no more meaningful show of support.

If there is one thing we did right over the years to garner this support, it’s that we stuck, almost stubbornly, to our mission: to be the technology that strengthens, not weakens, the relationship between real estate professionals and their clients.

10 years ago, our human-centric approach was seen as contrarian among the broader tech community. Today, despite all the technological and financial innovation, buying or selling a home has proven to be an inherently human exercise that requires a human relationship to anchor its success. And it can be empowered by a thoughtful, complementary technology solution. RealScout aims to be that solution.

Our team, and the future of RealScout

The story, of course, isn’t complete without addressing our team. Over the years, we’ve been lucky to have many incredibly talented people contribute to the company; but, it’s when we took the company fully-remote in 2017 that we unlocked our full potential.

Our team today is a genuinely remarkable group of highly talented individuals of all backgrounds, focused on fulfilling our mission. The simple truth is that shared success with this group of people is motivation enough.

So what’s next? Naturally, we will continue to push the envelope developing tools for brokerages, teams, and agents to help nurture and convert their clients. We’ve been consistently upgrading our platform over the years, and this will only accelerate. In fact, we’re getting close to announcing key features that expand our customers’ ability to nurture and convert a broader audience of real estate consumers.

We’ll also continue to champion an open ecosystem for real estate tech, working with various stakeholders to make sure that every user gets the experience and control they deserve. The industry has come a long way in just the last few years, and I think there’s a lot more that vendors like us can do for the good of the ecosystem.

Most importantly, we’ll continue to be the real estate tech company that empowers, not disrupts people. As seen in the anecdotes above, we are at our best when working closely with and for our customers. You can count on us to listen to you, understand your goals, and make changes to solve the most important problems you face.

10 years on, we feel a strong sense of belonging in this community and, as a result, a profound sense of responsibility.

Our aspirations as young entrepreneurs weren’t ignoble or misguided; but, where we are today far surpasses our expectations of 10 years ago. It’s a true blessing.

Thank you for walking with us the first 10 years. Here’s to 10 more!

Andrew Flachner
President and CoFounder

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How Brokerages Thrived Through the Biggest Power Shifts in 2020

How top brokerage leaders across the U.S. built a unique tech ecosystem to forge a path for long-term success

By Andrew Flachner

Amid a tumultuous and unpredictable year, real estate’s playmakers innovated at record pace and deployed new strategies that are redefining the future of the industry. Blink, and you might have missed some of these seismic shifts this year:

Q1: the implementation of NAR’s Clear Cooperation policy, a response to walled-garden listing data strategies that rose to prominence in 2019.
Q2: the pandemic necessitated the deepening of remote home buying/selling, a massive acceleration of a trend already in motion for many years.
Q3: Zillow’s announcement to harness its dominance with consumers to broker their own iBuyer transactions.
Q4: a major new player entered residential real estate with CoStar’s acquisition of HomeSnap, providing the $34B company access to one of the biggest real estate audiences in the country.

These developments represent the breakdown of long-held assumptions, yet another wave of talent and capital entering the space, and a consequential shift in economic and operational power throughout the landscape. Meanwhile, despite the climate of uncertainty, brokerage leaders have met these challenges by deploying their own long-term strategies, taking an objective look at their own strengths and doubling down on the unique opportunities presented to them.

Chart showing number of brokerages using the RealScout Buyer Graph

One such group of leaders represent 48 brokerages who, in 2020 alone, became vocal and active advocates for delivering best-in-class tech experiences for their clients and agents. This conviction is motivated not only by the need to fulfill modern technology needs, but also by the prediction that such robust brokerage platforms act as both defense and offense against disruptive changes in the industry. A key benefit of a strong technology experience is the ability to engage, and therefore secure, both clients and agents to the brokerage. Whether at the lead-gen phase, the home search phase, or the transaction management phase, new entrants in the market understand the critical importance of making sure real estate consumers are engaged on first party platforms. Brokerage leaders who partnered with RealScout share this view, and see a strong brokerage-owned consumer technology ecosystem as table-stakes to compete in the evolving marketplace. Deploying powerful agent/client collaboration tools is a simple, yet powerful, starting point to engage consumers and keep them in the agent and broker ecosystem. These tools lead to higher lead-conversion and the ability for agents to manage a higher volume of clients. Furthermore, the engagement these tools create ensures brokerages are well positioned to harvest the byproducts of increased repeat and referral business, and the most valuable opportunity of all: data.

Many of the developments in 2020 seek to bypass or disrupt the traditional brokerage ecosystem or business practices, despite the fact that the incumbent model is still the center-of-gravity of the industry as a whole.

As with almost any other technology experience, user engagement and data are inseparable in real estate. The key observation these leaders have made, is that there’s a big disconnect in real estate consumer data where the owner of the client relationship — the agent and brokerage — typically don’t have access or control of the client data that is generated. In other words, a consumer may work with an agent to buy or sell a home, but because they use third party technology, the agent has no visibility into the technology usage, let alone the ability to then add further value to the consumer through those insights.

This is another reason why a RealScout-facilitated data strategy resonates with brokerage leaders. Since the platform is designed for secure yet transparent handling of client behavior and preference data. Instead of giving away this critical asset to 3rd party portals, agents using RealScout can better understand and serve their clients. Brokerages and agents also have more visibility into their client base and therefore the overall health of their business.

While this strategy is immensely valuable to individual brokerages, there’s a broader opportunity that encompasses the brokerage ecosystem as a whole. Many of the developments in 2020 seek to bypass or disrupt the traditional brokerage ecosystem or business practices, despite the fact that the incumbent model is still the center-of-gravity of the industry as a whole. The simple yet powerful conclusion is that by doubling down on their strengths, brokerages and agents can unlock opportunities far greater and more tangible than some of the long-shot bets made in 2020.

A concrete example of this rallying cry occurred this year as 48 brokerages across 5 regions anchored “Buyer Graphs.” These initiatives brought together leading brokerages to build an open platform that securely and thoughtfully shares engagement data generated on RealScout. In doing so, the brokerages get a deeper insight into the market as a whole, deepen inter-brokerage collaboration, and ultimately deliver a more data-driven, sophisticated home buying experience to clients.

Nearly 50,000 agents are now part of these initiatives, providing access to insights and decision-making tools unavailable anywhere else.

These RealScout-powered initiatives have popped up in major metropolitan areas such as Washington DC, New England, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Orange County, and Denver/Northern CO. In fact, nearly 50,000 agents are now part of these initiatives providing access to insights and decision-making tools unavailable anywhere else.

Even the most unpredictable element of 2020, the global pandemic, was something these brokerages were better prepared for, thanks to these strategies. A best-in-class collaborative technology was exactly what agents and clients needed during remote transactions, and the results speak for themselves.

What’s striking about the strategy set forth by these brokerage executives is its simplicity and consistency. By focusing on the singular goal to provide the best possible first-party client experience — an experience that intimately involves client/agent collaboration — these leaders have been successful in responding to big industry trends, even larger macro-economic challenges, all the while elevating their ability to serve clients.

Although 2021 may prove to be just as unpredictable as 2020, the lesson learned from these leaders is that blindly chasing and reacting to trends is not the key to success. Instead, a simple, consistent, potentially contrarian vision, carefully formulated and boldly executed will protect against busts and accelerate booms.

Zillow’s Big Announcement: Focus on Your Strengths

The far-reaching impact of Zillow’s announcement that they’ll be hiring their own agents to represent iBuyer transactions is being discussed by many excellent analysts and journalists.

But I wanted to talk about what you, as a brokerage executive, should do with this news.

One simple way to explain Zillow’s deepening iBuyer strategy, is their realization that they are better off directly monetizing their Top-of-the-Funnel dominance, instead of indirectly through reselling agent leads.

Zillow is doubling down on their key advantage.

And my recommendation to you, is to do the same.

Where does your current business come from? My guess is that the majority (90%+) is sphere of influence, repeat business, and referrals. These are all areas where a relationship (instead of web-performance) is driving consumer decisions.

Focus on and invest in your advantage. You have a value-proposition—for now—that Zillow can’t compete with. If you can strengthen and solidify your network of current and future clients at the Middle-of-the-Funnel, you’ll be in a much more secure position going forward.

Since day one, deepening the relationships between brokerage, agents and consumers, has been the mission of RealScout. This isn’t an opportunistic marketing message, it’s what we do every day for our partners like Long & Foster, Howard Hanna, and TTR Sotheby’s International Real Estate, who each recognized the importance of doubling-down on relationship-based strategies.

Whether it’s diving deeper into Zillow strategy, or discussing how we can build a strong Middle-of-the-Funnel for your organization, we’re here to talk.

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Erika Cappa Joins RealScout as Director of Brokerage Relationships

RealScout is excited to introduce the newest member of our team, Erika Cappa. Joining us as the Director of Brokerage Relationships, Erika brings seven years of experience as the Director of Technology Management & Support at RE/MAX INTEGRA.

At RealScout, Erika will work to advocate for our customers throughout the country, strengthen relationships with our brokerage customers, and support them after the initial implementation. Gathering customer feedback and questions, she will use her expertise in real estate technology and customer support to help our team develop the right solutions.

A problem-solver and a people-person, Erika started her career as a Military Police Sergeant in the US Army, where she was deployed overseas, serving tours in Iraq. Transitioning into the civilian workforce, she got her B.S. from University of Maryland. During her time at RE/MAX INTEGRA, she led a team that supported more than 17,000 individuals throughout North America and was instrumental in the implementation of three full technology platform transitions.

We’re thrilled to welcome Erika to the team, where she will ensure our customers have the best experience and ROI using the RealScout platform.