Some real estate agents ask clients to fill out a quiz so they can home in on the sort of neighborhood and property those clients are seeking.
Casamatic, a property-matching service covering the Cincinnati area with plans to expand to other markets, is now offering a tool that streamlines this process for agents.
Agents can share the tool to help buyers uncover more listings that match their lifestyle and community preferences — sometimes in pockets where both agent and buyer might not think to look.
The product marks a shift in strategy for Casamatic. The startup has ditched plans to compete with listing portals, pivoting to repurpose its technology into a search tool that agents can share with customers.
Casamatic buyer profile showing buyer’s activity on Casamatic’s search tool
Quiz and search centered on lifestyle preferences
Casamatic gauges prospective buyers’ preferences through a quiz centered on lifestyle preferences, like travel time to friends and work, along with favorite activities, foods and home styles. Then it returns listing search results that aren’t dictated by neighborhood boundaries.
Agents and brokerages can privately invite consumers to use agent or brokerage-branded desktop and mobile versions of Casamatic’s search tool via email, but Casmatic plans to eventually make the search experience embeddable in real estate sites.
Users who accept an agent’s invitation can see listing matches based on their answers to Casamatic’s quiz and receive alerts whenever new listings matching their preferences hit the market.
Sample email invitation from agent to use Casamatic
The perks for agents
Agents can view a customer’s listing matches and activity on Casamatic. They also receive alerts for new listings matching a customer’s search criteria and status updates to listing matches.
By default, Casamatic doesn’t let consumers search based on specific locations, instead making listing matches based only on preferred lifestyle, community and property criteria.
So the tool could benefit agents and consumers by digging up listings that they might not uncover by searching based on geographic boundaries and property attributes alone.
“They’re going to see more inventory of homes they like,” said Casamatic CEO Alex Bowman of customers whose agents equip them with Casamatic’s search tool.
While Casamatic’s search experience can transcend neighborhood boundaries, agents can still choose to restrict a customer’s listing search results to particular geographies if they choose.
The search product costs $79 a month with volume discounts for brokerages.
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Listing match email alert from Casamatic
Sunsetting the consumer-facing portal and app
Mixing an IDX (Internet Data Exchange) feed with its lifestyle-centric search technology, Casamatic currently only lets users search listings in the CincyMLS, a multiple listing service (MLS) covering the Cincinnati area. But Casmatic plans to soon roll out the tool to a number of other markets.
Casamatic previously made its search platform available on a public website and through a consumer mobile app.
Like some other search portals, it planned to funnel site visitors to agents in exchange for fees from agents. But Bowman said the firm discovered that that was shaping up to be difficult to pull off.
At the same time, the firm observed that some of the tools that agents use to set up clients on listings alerts from the multiple listing services (MLSs) left much to be desired, both in terms of the nature of their search experience and their user friendliness — particularly on mobile devices, he said.
So the firm has sunsetted both its consumer-facing search portal and app to turn agents into the gatekeepers of its search experience.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct that Casamatic sees its search tool for agents as a replacement for other agent search tools, not a supplement.
