RES.net, which offers a real estate transaction communication and listing platform, has teamed up with a national asset management company to launch a service that allows real estate agents to represent a property twice.
Dubbed “The Boomerang Project,” the service allows agents to submit properties of any kind — whether REOs, short sales, multiproperty sales, vacant land, subdivisions or traditional equity sales — to a portal operated by Torrance, Calif.-based Precision Asset Management for investors in the company’s network to review. The agent submitting the property can be, but does not have to be, the listing agent.
Submitted properties must qualify under investor guidelines to be considered, namely, the property must provide the investor with a minimum 10 percent return on any cash put into the property. So far, most submissions pass, offering between a 10 and 25 percent return, Michael Hermosillo, Precision’s director of operations, told Inman News.
Once an investor decides to purchase, the agent who submitted the property can represent the investor as the buyer’s agent and may represent both sides of the deal if he or she is also the listing agent. Then, when the investor resells the property, the same agent represents the investor as the listing agent.
Precision’s asset management team handles the investor purchase, and the agent manages the resale of the property through RES.net’s platform. Precision collects an asset management fee from the investor for the property’s maintenance, rehab and marketing, and a 20 percent referral fee from the agent each time the property is sold, Hermosillo said.
The agent reselling the property must be or become a RES.net subscriber. Annual subscriptions to RES.net start at $325 per year. Nine out of 10 times, the agent is already on the RES.net system, Hermosillo said.
“We did a test pilot in August with many submissions and we’ve had close to 60 deals thus far under contract,” he said.
“It’s an opportunity for investors to see nationwide opportunities through the great amount of agents RES.net has signed up to the system nationwide.”
RES.net is a subsidiary of U.S. Real Estate Services Inc., which provides REO valuation and other REO-related services. The company offers a variety of portals designed to connect the various parties in real estate transactions, including brokers, homeowners, buyers and third-party service providers.
“By joining forces with Precision Asset Management, we are enabling agents to take advantage of today’s high level of investor activity,” said Todd Mobraten, COO and president of Lake Forest, Calif.-based RES.net, in a statement.
“In addition to providing technology to drive efficiencies and transparency throughout a transaction, this is one example of how RES.net constantly seeks to identify ways to help clients expand their businesses.”
In February, nearly 90,000 agents affiliated with real estate franchisor Re/Max gained access to RES.net’s Agent Portal, a communication and back-office management tool that allows agents to invite contacts into their networks, share tasks and documents, and send messages to their clients and others involved in transactions.
Also that month, REO property management and marketing company New Vista Asset Management chose RES.net’s REO Portal as its “system of record.”
In December, RES.net announced that it was expanding the listings on the RES.net network to include not only REO properties, but “prelisted” properties. Mobraten said at the time that about half of the network’s 200,000 users were agents, and the rest included mortgage servicers, settlement service companies and valuation groups.
