In my prior career as a web marketing executive, I noticed that 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 search side, there are great real estate search engines like StreetEasy and Zillow (and many others), but there were few places for people looking to use technology to buy and sell their homes in a new and better way.

I have sold and bought several apartments with the help of agents (some great, some not so great), and it occurred to me that what was needed was an online platform geared to real estate that would dramatically improve the efficiency of the transaction.  This platform would offer efficiencies over the traditional way of creating a listing and marketing it to buyers and enable buyers to access tools to make finding the right home more efficient.  It would also tap into the vast amounts of data generated by real estate transactions that have only recently become public – and to use this data to coach buyers and sellers from listing to close.

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

As an example, our RealDirect for Buyers program collects a 70 data point buyer profile and scores it 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 room for a work space away from the kitchen.  In the end, this collective wisdom from structured data 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 available to work with every RealDirect client who wants assistance.  But where there are patterns and data that can help guide buyers and sellers to a faster and more efficient transaction, they should be utilized.

Doug Perlson is CEO of RealDirect, a next generation real estate brokerage and marketing platform based in NYC.

Twitter: @dougperlson

Facebook: facebook.com/realdirect

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