Angela Rose 
Comments
July 2, 2020 
A home is more than just the biggest purchase most consumers ever make. It’s also a place they fill with memories, gather with family and friends, and a source of both psychological and physical safety. Though debt-to-income, interest rates, closing costs, and other financial factors must come into play once a property is chosen, the actual process of finding the right home is an emotionally stressful one for most consumers. Fortunately, real estate agents and brokers can alleviate that stress as well as many other potential distractions if they use RealScout.
Andrew Flachner, one of the company’s co-founders, spoke with RewardExpert about the inspiration behind the software platform, the services RealScout provides, and how they benefit real estate agents and brokers financially by turning more leads into offers.
Advanced Technology for the Real Estate Industry
“My co-founder, Michael Parikh, and I founded RealScout in 2012 to help empower brokers and agents with the most robust data and advanced technology available in our industry,” Flachner said. “We started by building a collaborative home search platform. Since then, we’ve grown our customer base to tens of thousands of agents who rely on RealScout to help power their relationships.”
RealScout’s product, which is designed to support the agent-ready to offer-ready portions of the homebuying lifecycle, is now available in 75 markets across the country. These include major metropolitan areas such as San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, Seattle, Austin, Massachusetts, Chicago, Denver, and Washington DC as well as North and South Carolina, and Florida.
Flachner said RealScout is expanding service offerings at a rapid pace and expects to add 20 to 30 new markets this year. The company has enjoyed a 214 percent year-over-year growth in customers.
Turn Leads into Clients and Offers
According to data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 51 percent of buyers find the home they eventually purchase on the Internet, with 30 percent using a real estate agent to help them do so. There are an estimated 2 million active real estate licensees in the U.S., so these buyers have a lot of professionals from which to choose. However, agents and brokers using RealScout have an advantage.
The award-winning listing platform, which includes up-to-the-minute MLS data, photos, personalized text, and is branded for each agent, is an industry-first computer-vision powered home search. Flachner said that computer vision, or CV, “enables a home buyer to open a slideshow of photos for a real estate listing and instantly skip to the room type they are most interested in.”
“Instead of clicking dozens of times to find that picture of the kitchen,” he continued, “they can simply click ‘kitchen’ to view all photos of the kitchen. We also use CV to create a compare view. This allows for side-by-side, room-by-room comparison of two to three listings.”
Homebuyers love the RealScout home search platform and appreciate the intuitive features and real-time alerts that keep them engaged in the process. Their agents love RealScout because the data-driven tool enables them to track where their buyers are at in the home search and react accordingly. Testimonials on the RealScout website include brokerages that have significantly increased their year-over-year production using the platform.
Easy to Use and Affordable
RealScout integrates easily with other real estate systems such as Realtor.com, Trulia and Zillow to make adding leads and contacts simple.
“Agents and brokers use RealScout to incubate leads in a ‘safe haven’ for collaboration,” said Flachner. “In other words, agents and their clients are able to use the same platform, eliminating the need for homebuyers to explore third-party sites where they are often distracted by advertisements for other agents.”
At only $39 a month or $399 a year, use of the collaborative platform is affordable for any real estate agent. A 14-day free trial is available for new customers.