About 7 weeks ago we launched the Agent Managed RealDirect service, which allows home owners to sell their home with our powerful online sales platform and have the entire process managed by a RealDirect agent (and do it for as little as a 1% commission).  Today we announced RealDirect for Buyers - an equally revolutionary buyer service for home buyers in Manhattan.  Learn more about the service here.

RealDirect for Buyers is consistent with our mission of bringing buyers and sellers of residential real estate together in a more efficient way – and ultimately passing the savings on to our clients.  Here, we borrow from another area of the online world to improve upon the real estate brokerage.  In this case, we leverage structured databases (think online dating).  Quite simply, there are a lot of attributes in an apartment that make it the right fit for a buyer – and these go way beyond the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and neighborhood.  With RealDirect for Buyers, we are doing what any good agent would do – we are gathering all of the clients needs and assessing the right place for them.  However, we are taking it a bit further.  We break these datapoints (we collect ~70 of them) down and score them by level of importance.  We then match the buyer’s relevant criteria to specific properties we believe best represent the data.  And then we track which homes (and characteristics) the buyer ultimately chooses and adjust our scoring to reflect the real life choices being made.

In a lot of ways, this is what an experienced agent does.  They can tell that your desire for outdoor space may ultimately mean you want more light in your next apartment.  Or that if you work from home, you should have a specific layout.  In the end, this collective wisdom from structured data ensures that every client gets this benefit  – and ultimately helps the client find the right home faster.

Yes – we all realize that every home and individual is unique, and that an algorithm cannot create a perfect match every time.  That’s why we have agents working with every RealDirect for Buyers client.  But where there are patterns that can help guide a buyer to the home they will ultimately buy in a shorter time frame, they should be explored.

Oh, and most importantly, because we are so confident that our process makes us more efficient, we give a 1% rebate to all of our clients on closing.  Happy buying!

Hi everyone!  Thanks for stopping by our blog.  Today is a very important day for RealDirect.  We announced our business, our backers and our first client.

I hope the pages of our website do a good job of explaining what we do, but I wanted take a moment to explain the backstory of why we created RealDirect.

As a web marketer, I have noticed over the years the declining importance of traditional offline advertising for selling things.  It all started in the late 90s, when people began relying on search engines to find things they wanted to buy.  As search and online advertising became an increasingly important form of marketing, it became apparent that if you wanted to sell anything in volume, you needed to market it online.  And unless you did this as a part of your day-to-day job, you probably needed some help to get it right.  There was born the Online Marketing industry.  (And there begat my 10-year career running online marketing companies.)

Interestingly, certain industries that are particularly suitable for online marketing were slow to adopt the new form.  And as a former real estate lawyer and a full-time real estate junkie, I found the Real Estate industry was a most glaring example.  This happened for a variety of reasons, but for the most part, those reasons have disappeared in the past few years, leaving an industry that is still catching up.  On the buy side, there are great real estate search engines like StreetEasy and Zillow (and many others), but there were few places for sellers looking to use technology to sell their homes in a new and better way.

I have sold a few apartments with the help of agents (some great, some not so great), and it occurred to me that what was needed was an online marketing platform geared to selling real estate that would dramatically improve the efficiency of the transaction.  This platform would enable marketing across all types of media (search, display, online and offline) as well as offer efficiencies over the traditional way of creating a listing and marketing it to buyers.  But it would go further than that.  It would also tap into the vast amounts of data generated by real estate transactions that have only recently become public – and use this data to coach the seller from listing to close.

RealDirect is that platform. Our goal at RealDirect is to make the home selling process easy enough that a non-pro can do it well and save a lot of money in the process, but also offer full-service options for those that don’t want to do it themselves.  And we do it by tracking each listing’s performance, crunching data and offering personalized, real-time recommendations to ensure an effective sale.

But the fun doesn’t end with technology.  While spending the last year building the platform and talking to real estate industry pros, home owners and investors, we quickly became acquainted with the negative connotation associated with The Real Estate Agent.  While I can honestly say that some of the smartest, most honest people I know are agents, we recognized that there is a built-in conflict of interest with how many seller/agent agreements are structured, and how agents are compensated.  Our secondary goal was to eliminate these conflicts and offer complete transparency in the selling process–and to save the seller a lot of money along the way.  That is why we offer smart commissions and fee for service approaches for our clients.  In the end, our clients have the power to decide how they want to work with us, and how they want to compensate us for our services.

So if you are considering selling your home in NYC, be sure to check out our services.  And please use the feedback tabs to let us know what you think.  Thanks for reading!