The following interview is a conversation we had with Tim Quirk, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Final Offer, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $11 Million Raised to Build the Future of Real Estate Negotiation
Tim Quirk
Yeah, you as well, Brett. Thanks for having me. Excited to share our story.
Brett
Yeah, super excited as well. I’d love to just take off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Tim Quirk
Sure, yeah. So again, I’m Tim Quirk. I’m one of four co founders of Final offer. It’s an offer negotiation platform for residential real estate. I’ve been in the business of going to market and taking products to market over the course last 25 years in all different types of walks of life when it comes to tech. Even saw in your background you had some material sciences in there. Myself, I actually worked for an old division of Polaroid that did driver’s licenses and national ids. And so we commercialized all of these crazy materials that when people would try and like if you tried to save your id when you were under 21, this stuff would actually dissolve it right in front of your eyes, like pretty amazing stuff. But I’ve been in the software space now for a little less than 20 years.
Tim Quirk
I’ve been having a lot of fun doing it.
Brett
How have you seen software evolve over the last 20 years?
Tim Quirk
It’s interesting. So when I first got into it, I was actually an intern with Inc magazine, you know, the small business magazine, and they were looking to connect small businesses and all of the different, what they used to call asps, all the different business software in the cloud. And this is when Salesforce had first started. Right. And so my introduction to software really was the very beginning of cloud. So I’ve seen it evolve with our previous company, erecruit, which was a big enterprise software platform for the largest staffing companies in the world. That was web based software, cloud software. But we still dealt with archaic stuff where we have to bring these legacy solutions over from as 400. These really old, big archaic systems to now you take a look at what you can do.
Tim Quirk
It’s pretty incredible what you can do with just the click of a button, being able to configure workflow automation and throw AI on top of that. Its insane whats happened even in just the last five years.
Brett
Robert, what about the competitive landscape? I have to imagine 20 years ago there wasn’t anywhere even close to amount of the competition thats out there today.
Tim Quirk
Yeah, its just different. Right. I think its definitely faster competition, definitely faster today. And you always got to be watching your back in terms of whats coming. But if you can still, I still think its tried and true. If you can build a strong foundation and something that has value that others don’t have, you’ve got an opportunity to really crush it. I know one of the questions that you had as we’re going into this was like, what are some of your favorite books? And for those that are listening, it’s like the old bible of taking tech companies to market. But Jeffrey Moore’s crossing the chasm. If you haven’t read it, go read it, because it’s still applicable today.
Tim Quirk
And if you can follow those steps, create beachheads and then ultimately get to scale, that’s still applicable as much today as it was 20 years ago.
Brett
Yeah, I remember when someone first recommended that book to me and I got a copy and it just looks so old. I’m like, what is this book going to teach me about technology? This is the dumbest book recommendation ever. I’m an idiot. All of these things apply. It’s more true today than ever before. It’s crazy how timeless that book was.
Tim Quirk
Jeff. Yeah, I was fortunate as young, early 20 something in my first job, actually being able to work with their consulting company, with a business that I first started with, which was a tech company in the.com space that was linking barcodes to the Internet. This is back in the early 2000. You think about, we’re ten years too early. But I thought I hit it out of the park at the very beginning. That’s another story for another day.
Brett
We’ll save that for part two.
Tim Quirk
Yeah.
Brett
Let’s dive right into final offer. So take me back to January 2021, the founding of the company. What were those early conversations like with your co founders? And what was it about this problem, this business that made you say, yep, that’s it. Let’s go dedicate the next 510 15 years of our life to it.
Tim Quirk
Yeah. So we just came off of previously doing it in an effort in the industry. So, like, I had mentioned, Im one of four founders. Three of us had worked together at our previous company, Erecruit, where Judd and Donko had been the ones to actually build the foundation of that technology, which was an enterprise software platform for the staffing and recruiting industry. And so we helped millions and millions of people go to work every day, get employed, get paid, those companies build their clients like all of that. And it was really cool to be able touch the lives of millions of people. And so as were starting to exit that company, we started to look at, wow, what are the parts of your life still haven’t been touched by technology that touches everyone?
Tim Quirk
And whats one of the biggest transactions of everyone’s lives right now? You’ve just gone through a couple in purchasing a new home and Im like, man, just this experience is just so opaque and you have no idea whats happening. And you’re crossing your fingers if you’re going to get your offer accepted. So we started looking at it that way. Judd, who was one of my founders, wed be on flights and hes like, hey, the tam of real estate is gigantic. The tam in our last there in our previous industry was half a billion. We see it for us, the final offer at 50 billion. And so we’re like, how could we actually change the way that real estate is bought and sold? But we do nothing about it other than being consumers. Right.
Tim Quirk
And so for us as consumers, we’re like, hey, we can do this. This is easy. And then we started to talk to a real professional who’s one of the top brokers in Boston, Kevin Caulfield, our fourth founder, and started to get into the nitty gritty on how top real estate agents actually operate, how they work. And it was very clear that there’s a huge problem in the market that could be solved, one that hadn’t been because no one’s tried to do it from the inside out. Too many tech companies have tried to take the real estate community out of the equation, but it’s just not going to happen. The best real estate agents in the world, they’re amazing and they do great job. But as people that only buy and sell property a few times in your life, you don’t really realize it, right?
Tim Quirk
And so we started looking at the problem of, here’s the simplicity of it. Brett, you ever bought or sold a home?
Brett
Yes, I have.
Tim Quirk
Have you ever felt like you left money on the table when you sold it?
Brett
Yes.
Tim Quirk
Okay. Have you ever made an offer on a property and I had it accepted and wonder why?
Brett
Yes, I have.
Tim Quirk
Have you looked at it when it sold and said I would have paid more.
Brett
I have.
Tim Quirk
Yeah. Okay. So when you start to get a certain age, people have the same answers to these questions. It’s wild. And so our whole thesis was, look, if we could help the real estate industry provide transparency to the consumer base, could everyone win? Could real estate agents and the brokerages grow their businesses by being more transparent and providing more trust in the space, which is one of the least trusted industries in the country? Right. We’ve actually polled almost 1000 real estate agents and we’ve asked them the question, do you trust other real estate agents? What do you think the percentage is of folks that don’t? That is 91% don’t trust their peers. So if they dont trust their peers, how can consumers be expected to trust them or the process? And so we started peeling that back. Okay, how can we build trust?
Tim Quirk
Well, transparency builds trust. So if you could put it out there into the world, what would a seller take for their home? Whats the actual process they want to go through when it comes to the process of selling their home and be upfront and giving buyers an opportunity to know, hey, there is other offers on the table, this is competitive. Can you see the price in terms of the offers? Maybe. But can you imagine if you just got an alert, the text message, when an offer came in on a home that you really wanted? I mean if you’re sitting there with you and your spouse, you being other, your family, and you’re like, this is the place for us, the next 20 years you’re going to act, you’re going to call your agent, say, figure out what’s going on, you want to move.
Tim Quirk
So that’s the type of problem that we’re looking to solve. And we’re quickly accelerating and seeing a huge opportunity market to solve this. Not just in the US, it’s actually global. It’s the same problem everywhere on the face of the earth.
Brett
Why does this exist? Why does it suck so bad?
Tim Quirk
You just don’t know. I mean look at all of our walks of life, everything that we do in our life. We can go into a transaction, know whats in front of us and we have the opportunity to buy it if we want. A home is slightly different. Its not a car, its not a piece of art, its not a front row ticket, but at the same time, if you want it, you should be able to go purchase it. And so whats important to the seller? Well, thats by seller to seller and they’ve never had the opportunity to actually state what they want, we can go to Zillow today and we can go take a look at, hey, heres a house, heres a $2 million house in Boston, and heres that square footage. Heres a lot of time its sold. Heres the taxes.
Tim Quirk
Get all that information. But you know what? When they put it on the market, all that we know is a list price. And all that is an advertisement, especially where you are, right? I mean, folks, underpriced property in the Bay Area all day long. Oaklands a great example. People will list it at 900,000. The thing goes for one six. They’re creating competition, but it’s still opaque. No one knows where it’s going to go. So if you could just be upfront with the market about, from a seller’s perspective, what you want, not just when it comes to price, but also about terms like maybe closing. Maybe you can’t move in time for a closing. Well, if you let me stay in my house, that’s worth 30 grand to me, I’ll let you know up front that matters.
Tim Quirk
You want to compete with an all cash offer, that’s great. But it might cost you $20,000 more than someone else that’s coming in. It might cost you $20,000 more an offer for me to accept it. You’re going to be making it with a mortgage versus someone else’s coming in all cash. Imagine if actually knew that stuff upfront. It’s not hard to do, but no one does it.
Brett
Why does no one do that?
Tim Quirk
It seems obvious. I know, right? That’s what, it’s just the culture. It’s just been the nature of how property has been sold. And it’s funny, we feel like we’re almost starting to become historians of the real estate industry. We started going way back in time to learn, like, how did this work? And real estate agents actually back 100 years ago. The process, by the way, has not changed in over 100 years. And the only thing thats changed about it is technology has come a bit. Theres been more transparency in terms of whats on the market. But could you imagine 100 years ago, the real estate agent, there was no such concept of real estate agent, but they actually called them curb steaders, people that were selling property, they would actually come and put a sign on your lawn.
Tim Quirk
Imagine if someone else saw that sign and they’re like, but I can sell that property, too. They didn’t know. They’d come and they’d nail a sign in the lawn and all of a sudden you have 20 signs on your lawn from 20 different people that want to sell your house. And it’s just craziness. And so it’s just the nature of the way that real estate has been bought and sold in the US and in most other parts of the world. It’s been this opaque thing.
Tim Quirk
For whatever reason, the community has thought that by not being transparent, you can actually get a higher price for a property or better outcome for the seller, when in fact research shows more and more, if you can drive competition for property, its more opportune for the seller to be able to put it out there and be upfront with what it is. And the flip side of that is on the buy side, you’re like, well, I don’t want to pay more than what I need to. Well look at during the pandemic how many people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars more than maybe they needed to buy a property. They’re just guessing. Their agents were guessing. And so like, oh, go 300k over. Hopefully that’ll work. What if you actually knew what it was right?
Tim Quirk
And so we’ve been able to prove through our platform, we had over 500 properties sell through our platform last year and we’ve seen that buyers don’t have remorse and they will actually pay more for a property if they know what other people value it and they know whether or not they’re going to win or lose it. So the psychology of, it’s fascinating, Robert.
Brett
What’S the business model behind it then? How do you make money? Is it a percentage of the transaction like the agents, or are you selling this to the agents themselves?
Tim Quirk
Yeah, so we sell it to the real estate community themselves. So we sell a subscription, it’s software. So we sell subscriptions to agents that represent sellers. Agents can pay for it directly or their brokerages can pay for it. So what’s great for us is so in the spirit of transparency and growing a business, the way that we first launched the company and actually fundraised right in our previous company, we raised a bunch of private equity. In this one, went out to people that we knew to begin with to raise our 3 million seed round, and then we started to go to the real estate community and we found that real estate agents actually saw the top ones see this as the future they wanted to invest. The first three meetings went into real estate agents.
Tim Quirk
Each one of them wanted to invest a quarter million dollars into final off. Like, whoa, what is this all about? And so we’ve actually raised today now, and with the 11 million that we’ve raised in total, we’ve raised 80 real estate agents comprise a lot of that, which has been wild, right? So we see every meeting that we go into. More and more they want to invest. But the reason im going here is that when we first launched the business, we launched with individual and teams of real estate agents in specific areas. Washington DSC is actually the first area that we launched in October 22, officially. And we did that for eight months, ten months. And what we did was we learned about actually having to build negotiation into the technology, which was really challenging. We thought it would be easy.
Tim Quirk
It’s actually very hard to build negotiation. And so we actually have pending all about negotiation platform, not like an offer platform real estate. And as we learned, we realized, okay, this thing is ready for primetime. So in September, we opened it up to go to real estate brokerages and to allow brokerages to actually pay for the services for all of their agents to come on board. So went from having hundreds of properties being sold through the platform. There are now tens of thousands of properties on our platform just since September. And that is just continuing to go in hockey stick fashion as we continue to roll out state in state. We’re also rolling out in Canada in the next 30 days. So it’s just been an incredible experience for us to see. Hey, learn with the best.
Tim Quirk
Make sure that you got something that works and then hit the throttle when you know you can actually survive it. And that’s where we’re at when it comes to the business.
Brett
Something that you said a few minutes ago that I want touch on as well. What I’ve seen is, you know, startups coming in, and they almost take this like aggressive position against the real estate agents and the real estate brokerages, the aggressive language, like going to cut them out, things like that. It takes me back to a conversation I had a few years ago. My fiance, she’s from this like kind of small, like resort Mountain town in southern California around the lake. And I was talking with a guy who owns a real estate brokerage there. And one of these companies that try to come invested a lot to try to come in, and they lasted like six months, and they were done, they left town. And he was laughing. He was just saying, like, what the hell are they going to do?
Brett
Like, I went to school here since I was in like fifth grade. Like, it doesn’t matter how cool their technology is, like anything they can promise, like what they can’t beat is that I’ve been here since I was in fifth grade. And like, you can’t beat that, you know, I had all of the network and all of that stuff. And my takeaway there is like, you can’t do it without the agents, you can’t do without the brokerages. And trying to do that without them seems like that’s gonna be very tough.
Tim Quirk
Yeah, you’re crazy to do it. And frankly, the thing for them is that the ones that are doing this as a profession, right? So the thing is that if you look at with the National association of Realtors, there’s one and a half million licensed realtors in the United States, but last year, half of them did one or less transactions. Think about that for a second. Right? One or none. So the people that are doing this at the top of their game, that are actually doing the majority of the business are actually far and few between. It’s literally the top 10%, you could argue 5%, even a little less. And those folks are unbelievable. Business professionals, networkers, social, what they do for their communities, they’re absolutely incredible. They know their markets back of their hand. They are true professionals. You want to work with them.
Tim Quirk
And that’s the thing is that from a consumer’s perspective, right. We don’t do it that often. Like, oh, this commission is so expensive. Guess what? If you don’t work with a top agent, you’re going to get less pay them the commission because they’re going to get you way more than what you ever would if you tried to do it on your own or if you do it with someone that’s in season. And that’s one of the biggest learning lessons I’ve learned personally in terms of starting this business. But the thing is those agents, they work all day, every day. So giving them something that can help them be more efficient with their time is just gold.
Tim Quirk
So that’s what we’re doing with the community is really helping them to be more efficient in the way in which they go to market with their clients and the way in which they sell property.
Brett
I don’t want to ask hard questions here, but I’ll give you one. What’s your favorite real estate tv show now? I feel like there’s so many different real estate shows. Do you have a favorite?
Tim Quirk
Oh my gosh, my wife’s going to kill me. No, it’s funny. She’s got selling sunset and all those things on. She’s always watching those, you know, it’s funny. And we’re in the throes of it as we speak. There’s a UK program that was on years ago called grand designs, and it was people that were purchasing properties as their dream, but they had to put so much work and effort into it that they would go and do everything possible in their life to be able to fund it, to do it. People would take off from their jobs and they start doing it themselves. It’s like crazy labor or love. And then all of a sudden, at the end, most of the time, they had the nice, rosy, beautiful property that they expected, and sometimes they didn’t.
Tim Quirk
We’re currently in the middle of that type of project. It’s been a multi year project with COVID and everything else. It’s fun to watch. If you haven’t watched it and you’re into that type of architecture design, it’s pretty cool.
Brett
Nice.
Tim Quirk
I’ll have to check that out.
Brett
I bet a loyal watcher, a million dollar listing. I don’t know if you watch that. Ryan Serhont’s a beast. Whenever I think about, like, people trying to take away commissions from real estate agents, I think about Ryan, sir. Hot. I think that’s someone we don’t want to mess with. He’s a Panama.
Tim Quirk
And they’re incredible. The agents that are on that program, they are true professionals. They do a great job.
Brett
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Tim Quirk
Yeah. So for us, it’s been interesting. We traditionally like as founders, we traditionally come from b two b play, except for Kevin, who’s been in real estate. And so for us, it’s been learning curve in terms of how do we get to the consumer as well. And so we’re putting our energy into the real estate community. So we actually are a marketing platform when you start to think about it a bit. And so we’re giving marketing tools and levers to the real estate agents. We actually built a certification program for agents to be able to learn how to negotiate what we found. What’s incredible is that you can go through and do all this training. There’s tons of training for real estate agents. Guess what? They don’t typically have training on negotiation.
Tim Quirk
And what’s the differentiator in the value add that they always go and tell their clients first, like I’m the best negotiator. Well, we’re helping them through that. We give them a certification program and they can be final offer certified and use that in their marketing. And so then we give them all these marketing tools as a way to be able to showcase their results by using our platform and sharing those stories out into the ecosystem. So we’re truly going after helping the agents be able to market themselves and helping the brokerages market themselves to be able to drive that adoption. And that helps us from a leverage perspective. Instead of having to spend millions of dollars of marketing, they can do it with us instead of doing it separately.
Brett
What did the creation of that certification program look like? Did you partner with an L and D company and have them build it out or did you build that out internally?
Tim Quirk
So we did it internally to start. And where were actually building that out now? So what we’ve done as we’ve grown and id mentioned, these real estate agents have wanted to come in and invest. Well they aren’t just wanted to come and invest. They’ve also wanted to come and work for us. So a bunch of our leadership team is now from the industry. So we have the number two individual real estate agent from Washington DC. She is an incredible person. Shes all over it. She helps teach the sales aspect of it. We’ve got a gentleman outside of Washington DC, second generation real estate agent. He’s a trainer and coach that goes all around the world doing this. He’s infused final offer into his training and coaching and then he does this as well. Right.
Tim Quirk
And so it’s been pretty cool is that we’re providing practical training through experts that actually do it as part of their business. They’re able to then go and share the case studies and the stories and the strategies on how to actually use this with real world examples, which in this particular industry, and I think this is in every industry, people want to learn from people that are really great within what they’re doing. That’s what we’re able to do is actually use great talent in the industry to help teach the masses.
Brett
I want to also ask about your title. So in 500 plus interviews, you are the very first chief strategy officer.
Tim Quirk
That we’ve had on the show.
Brett
So talk to us about the responsibilities, how you divide work between the four co founders and what your role looks like day to day.
Tim Quirk
Yeah. So it’s wild. So when we first started the company too, about transparency. So Kevin and I were co CEO’s and Judd and Donko were a bit separate. They had some other things going on when we first launched the business. As we’ve grown, i’ve taken a role specific to the go to market strategy press as well as experience side of the business. Kevin has taken a role specifically directly related into the real estate and real estate strategy negotiation. And what we’ve done is Donko is the tech leader in the business but also hes our business leader in Europe because all of our development team is in Croatia and Judd has always been the person to lead the investment rounds and leading the business from an operations perspective. So we actually flipped it about six months ago.
Tim Quirk
So Judd and Donko are now the co CEO’s of the business, running the business at that level. Kevin and I are out there evangelizing the company so that we can focus on that part of it.
Brett
Interesting. So sales marketing all back upwards to you?
Tim Quirk
Essentially, yeah. And we have a chief revenue officer that handles the day to day sales and marketing and it frees me up to be able to go and do much more of like the industry relation piece of this industry. The one thing that we learned about it and that’s the reason that having four co founders is unique and for us it’s been wildly beneficial because we all have our strengths and weaknesses, we know what they are and we all work together very well like that. When it comes to this industry it is a gigantic web, much bigger than anything I’ve ever worked in.
Tim Quirk
You have industry associations, regional associations, local associations, you have multiple listing services, you have brokerages, individual agents, teams, you’ve got all the different service providers that work into it when it comes to mortgage, title and all of these pieces and they all interconnect. So when typically you’re going to market a pet company, maybe you got one or two of those dynamics in place. This one’s got seven or eight different dynamics at all times that you’ve got to figure out how do you work within this entire community, which is a big learning curve from folks that are coming from other parts of tech, coming into prop tech. It usually takes folks from what we’re hearing anywhere from eight to ten years to actually learn.
Tim Quirk
So our focus is to actually meet the people that can help us accelerate that learning very quickly and that’s why we’re actually partnering with some of the best in the industry across real estate, coaching associations as well as investment.
Brett
Ill probably be off a little bit on the details here but im sure you can correct me. What was the big lawsuit that just took place over the last few months about real estate agent commissions. And is that going to have an impact, either positive or negative, on the approach that you guys take?
Tim Quirk
Yeah. So its a landmark case. So its the sister Burnett case. Its a case out of Missouri. But essentially what happened is a class action lawsuit of sellers that are suing the National association of Realtors and the largest brokerages basically on any competitive measures, monopolistic pricing. And they came down with a verdict, guilty. And so right now, the entire industry is in appeal mode. But they got struck down with $1.8 billion verdict, which could triple because its antitrust case that has subsequently had dozens and dozens of follow on lawsuits across the country with similar types of ramifications, actually much bigger dollar amounts. What it really can, and the Department of Justice has now gotten themselves into this as well, where basically its all about, we see is a lack of transparency when it came to compensation and how the industry is getting paid.
Tim Quirk
And so, unfortunately for the industry does a fantastic job. Like the majority of real estate agents, theyre great people. They do good work. They work extremely hard. They work way more than anyone ever knows, and their compensation is justified. But unfortunately, because of the opaqueness of how compensation was being, how agents are being paid. Right. Basically, sellers were paying the commission for the buyer. Agents and agents that were representing buyers were marketing themselves, that they had free services. The buyers didnt have to pay for it, when in fact, that really isnt true.
Brett
Right.
Tim Quirk
So thats whats going on right now. Whats going to happen? Whats the shakeout going to be? Im will tell, I think more than anything when we see it with the clients that have come to us. Its actually been helpful to our business, because now the word in real estate is transparency. Everything is about transparency. How can we be more transparent? Consumers are demanding it, the government’s demanding it. And we see our platform as the solution to that problem, where you can be as transparent as you possibly want, using our platform to manage the negotiation process and be upfront with what you want for selling your home.
Tim Quirk
And by being able to embrace that, we’ve got some of the largest brokerages in the US that are now partnering with us to be able to take that to market with that message, where they are embracing that and the ones that embrace it, that is the future it is today. Those are the ones that are going to continue to succeed. And this isnt anything new. By the way, what we did when we first launched a business is we’ve talked to hundreds of top real estate agents and the majority of them use transparency as a way to negotiate. They just never had a technology platform to do it.
Brett
Yeah I guess if consumers are demanding transparency thats one thing, but if the DOJ is demanding transparency thats another. It sounds like this going to be a positive then for the business overall and a win for consumers as well.
Tim Quirk
Yeah and I actually think it’s going to be a good change for the real estate industry as well. Frankly it’s been much needed in just how does the process work, how do we get paid and what are the expectations that are being set up front that hasn’t existed, that’s going to exist likely in the future as things shake out.
Brett
To date, what do you think has been the most important go to market decision that you’ve made?
Tim Quirk
Embracing the real estate community? Yeah 100%. So for us requiring that we are for the real estate agent, we are for improving their business, were for them helping their clients get the best outcomes for us. Very early on we first launched the platform. We launched it where yes, when you were selling a property you had to use an agent, but in the world today you don’t need a real estate agent to write an offer on a property. Right. You can do it yourself. Whether its going to get accepted or not, its a different story. So when we first launched, when we test marketed it, we test marketed this in Boston two years ago and we allowed buyers to come in and make offers on their own if they so chose. We just testing it, no one did.
Tim Quirk
But guess who got really upset with us? Real estate community. And were not doing it as a way to try and cut them out. We weren’t doing it as a way to destroy their income generation. We were doing it simply because thats the way that it works today in the world. We figured why would we change that? But as we learned, every offer that came in, these buyers were working with a licensed real estate agent. So we made a decision within two, three months to say look, this is for the agents, this is who were for. Let’s require that buyers and sellers work with licensed agents regardless of their buying or selling.
Brett
They’re going to work with one.
Tim Quirk
Moving forward using our platform.
Brett
Can you give us any numbers or maybe just tease us? I know you’re private so you don’t have to share it, but any numbers you can tease us on that highlight the growth in traction and adoption that you’re seeing.
Tim Quirk
Yeah. So when we first started, as I mentioned, we just worked with individual real estate agents and teams when we first launched. So when we launched in Washington, DC in October 22, we launched with nine really strong teams in the DMV market. When we hit September of 23, we had about 93 subscriber agents on the platform when we opened up our brokerage model. So between the end of September and now, which is March 13, we’ve signed 50 enterprise brokerage accounts that comprise over 10,000 agent users, comprise over 12,000 active listings, and we have the ability to upgrade over 7000 of those real estate agents from our base universal package to the premium package. What we’ve also done is we’ve opened up the platform because consumers love what were doing, the ability to see. You talked about reality tv before.
Tim Quirk
This is the ultimate reality tv. When you can sit there and watch a neighbors house sell in real time and you can get pinged while you’re sitting there watching your other reality tv show on your couch and you’re getting pinged with text messages that your neighbor’s house has got another offer. It’s pretty cool stuff. As more consumers learn about what we’re doing, they have a tendency to come to our site, save a search for their local area, and they’re able to then get real time alerts when offers come in and they’re able to see when a home sells. So think about this right. If there’s a property down the street from you today that goes under contract, you have no idea what it went for until it closes on our platform.
Tim Quirk
You know the moment it went under contract, if that price was transparent, you know the price that it sold for. And so they love to talk about it. People love to talk about it. And so that’s an enormous benefit for us when it comes to the growth of the platform. So by being able to open up with all listings and people being able to save searches, we’re finding that more and more consumers are now getting connected to agents using our platform than ever before. And we just opened it up a week ago. So we’re continuing to grow the company in stages as we get more critical mass in place.
Brett
Is there anyone who is against this level of transparency? One conversation I was just thinking of is I had some friends visiting from Europe and were driving around and I was showing them on zillow that you can just look up and see how much every house is worth. And they were just mind blown by that. And they viewed that as kind of an invasion of privacy, that those numbers were just out there like that. Is that something that you have to deal with at all? Is there anyone who’s like, we don’t want more transparency in the process.
Tim Quirk
Yeah. So it’s really interesting. You know, it’s funny. Go into chat GBT and type in, why is transparency good for real estate? Why is it bad? See what it spits out. It’s pretty fascinating to see. The only folks that we found that don’t want it are we could spend a whole other session on the ethical nature of certain real estate professionals that have been around for some time and the way that they practice their business. And so for the ones that use opaqueness and are not upfront, might flirt with, hey, yeah, i’ve got two other offers on the table, and maybe they don’t. Just maybe they’re not submitting all the offers that have been sent to them to the seller. Believe it or not, this happens.
Tim Quirk
I mean, were sitting here talking about transparency in real estate, and Kevin and I have sat literally in dozens and dozens of meetings with top agents that have told us, no, they don’t believe in it. They dont think its good, because what we find is it might expose them. It might expose them. Maybe they’re not the best negotiators in the world, or they use those types of tactics as a means to be able to get both sides of the deal, as an example. So do those people exist? Sure. And they’re going to always exist right where there are platforms there or not. They’re just not for us. But when it comes to the overall industry and what we found, consumer base is absolutely enamored with it. 99 out of 100 love it. And with the real estate community, its just changed.
Tim Quirk
Real estate community in general are folks that are pretty laggard when it comes to picking up new technology. There was a product that Zillow bought years back called showing time. All it is it’s a schedule. Well, it’s much grander now, but at the time, it was just a scheduling tool to see a property between the real estate agents. So if you were working with an agent, you wanted to go see a property tomorrow, they can go into showing time and say, yep, I’m going to bring Brett tomorrow, too. And you’d show up and you go see the property. Why would real estate agents be offended by that or think that’s going to take their business away? Believe it or not, they did. They’re like, you can’t do that. Why would you ever allow a technology to schedule the showings?
Tim Quirk
You should be calling your seller every time. That’s a great opportunity to have a conversation. It’s like, wait a second, I already have the listing. I already have the client. Why am I going to waste my time every time I need to show the property by picking up the phone and calling them? I don’t want to talk to them about the markets 20 more minutes. I just want to show the property right. And so it took them over ten showing time, by the way, was founded in the mid two thousands. Took them ten years to get going until they finally got into the MLS and got integrated into the ethos of how real estate agents work. But that was their fear, was that they were going to take the relationship away from the seller when it comes to scheduling solutions. Its crazy.
Tim Quirk
Thats the same thing with us. So its just new. Yes, we touch more of the heart of the transaction. We’ve learned that a lot of real estate agents have seen their value in writing a contract when in fact thats not their value. Their value is guiding and consulting their clients and is this the right investment for them? Is this the right purchase for them? Is this the right community for them? And they are able to help navigate them through the whole process and make sure that the deal stays together. That is the value of fantastic real estate agent, and we don’t touch that. All that we do is help streamline the transaction negotiation process at that point where it gets heated.
Brett
Robert, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 11 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Tim Quirk
Robert well, this is a tough environment, so this is an extremely tough environment to raise institutional capital today. Its still happening, but at different types of terms that wed likely prefer for us. Its been a great learning lesson for us, and maybe I can help some others with this as well. In our previous company, we had private equity firms put in tens of millions of dollars into e recruit, and they were great. But we also had half a dozen or so of our clients that invested in the company. And these were either executives or some of the biggest staffing or just one of the biggest companies in the world that employ people. What we found is that those individuals, those companies were the best partners we ever had, and they helped us grow. We helped them grow.
Tim Quirk
I mean, we would go in and actually help them sell their services to their customers, and they made billions off of it. And so I think that by being able to find, from an investment perspective, yes, you can get money from people, that’s fine, but being able to be strategic about it, we’ve been able to be very strategic about where we’ve been able to raise capital. And these are people that are stalwarts in the industry, that people look up to and respect and have great reputations that are being public and vocal about this is the right way to do business. And when you have tens of thousands of people following the top real estate coach in Canada as an example, hearing that this is the right way to do business, thats pretty powerful.
Tim Quirk
And so for us, being able to have those types of relationships and those types of investors into our platform has been gold because they’re using it, they’re evangelizing it. They believe in the mission. It’s not just a check for us. That’s been really important.
Brett
Final question for you, since we are up on time, let’s zoom out into the future. Three to five years from today, what.
Tim Quirk
Does the company look like? Yeah. So we’re either not around, which I don’t think is going to happen, but I think that we are going to become the de facto gold standard of how offer negotiation works in real estate. Whether we get global in that timeframe, time will tell, but we will definitely be across the North America within that timeframe. And if we continue to do what we do, make good partnerships and prove value, I’m hoping that we can change the experience for everyone that listens to this and everyone in the country to be able to have just a nicer, more pleasurable experience when they’re buying or selling a home.
Brett
Amazing. Love the problem that you’re solving. I love the approach that you’re taking to solve it. I really love this conversation. I think founders are going to get a lot of value from it, even if they’re not in real estate. I think that advice about just being in the community and embedding yourself in the community, it goes against what I see just a lot of tech companies do in general where they, like I said, with the other real estate platforms that take this, like, aggressive stance. So that was my big takeaway, and I think that’s just an incredibly valuable takeaway for founders.
Tim Quirk
Yeah, no, that’s great. Partnership is key. Love it.
Brett
Tim, thanks so much for taking the time.
Tim Quirk
Great, Brett, thank you as well. Take care.
Brett
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