Inman

With Everyhome, every house is on the market

Are you set up for success in 2016? Join 2,500 real estate industry leaders Aug. 4-7, 2015, at Inman Connect in San Francisco. Get Connected with the people and ideas that will inspire you and take your business to new heights. Register today and save $100 with code Readers.


Have suggestions for products that you’d like to see reviewed by our real estate technology expert? Email Craig Rowe.

Takeaways:

The pitch

Everyhome is a home sales platform for unlisted, unrepresented homeowners and interested buyers. Brokers can accept a fee of $4,000 to handle the sale from price agreement to close.

Type of software: Browser-based
Platform: Mac, Windows desktop OS, mobile OS
Ideal for: Forward-thinking agents interested in hybrid sales

Top selling points:

  • More product: Everyhome is making more inventory. By facilitating open communication about homes between consumers, the industry will benefit.
  • Reduced cost per sale: Private buyers and sellers start the transaction; agents engaged after agreed-upon price have spent little to acquire business. $4,000 flat fee for handling exchange.
  • True hybrid: Full-time traditional agents can also assist in Everyhome sales.

Things to consider:

  • Everyhome’s model demonstrates one of the most viable ways to upend traditional brokerages by inciting conversations about sales of homes not on the “traditional market.” It’s innovative and consumer-controlled. If you’re a traditionalist, this company is worthy of concern. If you’re progressive and realistic, stay tuned.

The close

It’s this simple: If an interested buyer sees a house they like — any house, “on the market” or not — Everyhome can help them make contact with the owner and offer the platform to buy it.

Or, if an owner is ready to sell, they use Everyhome to list their home, making it publicly available to tour and accept offers.

When a seller publishes their home, only offers submitted within the seller’s price range or above it will reach them.

Using comps, market data and proprietary math, Everyhome offers sellers a suggested price, but they’re free to set their own, which could lead to good lessons in this valuable aspect of home sales.

Sellers provide standard house and location information, upload images, and also offer buyers “What I love about my house.”

A screen capture from Everyhome’s website.

Whereas a lot of traditional marketing efforts produce vapid, hyperbolic tales of perceived elegance, Everyhome sellers offer authentic, original stories of their homes.

It’s different, and it works.

After a tour, negotiations and an agreed-upon price, sellers can then choose to engage an agent.

Everyhome has agent affiliations, but any licensed professional can be hired, provided they are open to the $4,000 flat fee for seeing it through.

The interfaces, back end and front, are highly user-centric, visually refined to focus on only the most critical touch points within a real estate transaction.

However, this is bigger than software. In brief, Everyhome wants every home everywhere on the market.

[Tweet “Everyhome wants every home everywhere on the market”]

Demand for a specific home is not limited to the dates on a listing agreement. We all drive by houses we’d like to tour, or houses we wish were ours. How do we know its occupants aren’t willing to move on?

Later this summer, when a partnership with Google Earth and Street View reaches fruition, Everyhome will provide users with ways to access more than 4 million homeowners in the San Francisco Bay Area and Puget Sound MSAs.

Then, it’s on to other markets.

A home is arguably our largest material asset, yet control of its acquisition or sale has never truly been in our control.

Everyhome has research that shows if given the option, sellers would also control who buys their house.

Naturally, the company will soon offer buyer profiles so sellers can decide that, too.

I agree with Inman’s Morgan Brown. It’s narrow-minded to think the hybridization of real estate brokerage is rooted in the financial.

The growth is being fertilized by consumer control and cultivated by innovative technology. No industry is immune to technology-backed consumer evolution.

Everyhome won’t eliminate real estate brokerage as we know it, but its model is about to hand over the buying and selling of homes in 10 major markets to their residents. It’s already operating in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area.

And that should open some eyes.

Now does $4,000 sound like a fair price?

Do you use Everyhome — and what do you think? Leave a comment and let us know!

Do you have a product for our tech expert to review? Email Craig Rowe.