SAN FRANCISCO — Your pizza pie is being prepared.
Your pie is in the oven.
Your pie is almost cooked.
Your pie is out of the oven.
Your pie is in the car.
The driver’s at your front door.
Talk about satisfying. These updates were delivered to Publisher Brad Inman via Domino’s Pizza app after he ordered 20 pizzas for a party. “I went ‘Wow, this is amazing,'” Inman said of the app.
Two days later he put an offer a house. Cue the cacophony of phone calls, voicemails, emails and questions racing through Inman’s mind as a buyer:
Did my Realtor present the offer? What did the sellers say? What did the agent say?
Now, pizza is no joke, but purchasing a house is arguably a tad more stressful. And Inman had a great agent. Yet as consumers the world over track their ride’s every move (Uber, Lyft) and their loved one’s flight trajectory and timing, homebuyers who have just made an offer are still left in the dark.
Enter “Offer Tracker.” A group of tech geniuses at Inman Connect worked around the clock and between meetings over three and a half days to create a fully functional version of an offer tracking app to make this 48-hour piece of the transaction (not the entire closing) more transparent and convenient. Their speedy work was made possible by developers who did some major pre-work including wire frames prior to the conference.
Alongside Jess Martin, CTO & co-founder of First.io, and Shane Farkas, CTO at The Agency, who both contributed to the app’s development, Inman talked about the team’s progress on the app on stage during Inman Connect’s final day.
The app tracks when an offer is:
- Ready for signatures
- Sent to you for signatures
- Signed and returned
- Submitted to listing agent
- Receipt confirmed
- Accepted
It’s not yet ready for prime time, but the open source software can be viewed at https://sandbox.inman.com/ot. Over the next two to three weeks, the developers will be finishing off the coding, adding nuance and collecting feedback.
Jess Martin and Shane Farkas on stage at Inman Connect
“In one week, we created something,” Inman said on stage. “It’s not done; we have some work to do. But everyone in this room would like to be that agile, that quick, that speedy.”
Rome wasn’t built in a day, but this lightning-fast development at Inman Connect is proof that tech teams can move quicker to put together clean products with clean code.
Time to get innovating!
Team members who contributed to developing the offer tracking app include:
- Jess Martin, CTO & co-founder, First.io
- Ricky Watts, systems administrator, Coldwell Banker Heritage
- Ed Tewiah, founder, PropertyWebBUilder.com
- Todd LaMothe, VP of engineering, Union Street Media
- Artur Grigio, CTO, ListingZen
- Ami Berger, co-founder/creator, Voiceter Pro LLC
- Tomas McCandless, Sr. engineer, Voiceter Pro LLC
- Tom Flanagan, CTO, The Group, Inc.
- Joel Burslem, chief strategist, 1000watt
- Paul Cooley, CTO, Imprev
- Shane Farkas, CTO, The Agency
