2. How is Opcity disrupting the real estate market?
conversion problem. Over 90 percent of all home buyers start their journey online, and the industry simply wasn’t equipped to respond to consumers in a way that helped them move from online to offline. We also saw that many consumers weren’t a good fit for agents that received the leads.
There were so many systemic issues in real estate that had to be addressed simultaneously for our model to work.
1. Opcity turned online leads from loss leader to profit center for thousands of brokerages. Most firms lose money on their online leads, and your average agent sees a -32 percent ROI on online ad spend. We took the risk of investing in buying leads with our own money so we could prove that our lead conversion model worked. We also put our money where our mouth is by having a referral model so brokers and agents only pay for our services on close. That took a lot of faith in our generation-to- close conversion model. 2. Opcity had to do the hardest part of Uber and Match.com at the same time! With the advent of technology, today’s consumer expects a response and results virtually instantly. That’s why we respond to new consumer inquiries in our system on average within 4 seconds. We also connect real, motivated consumers with an agent in real time while on the same phone call. When you call an Uber, you just want to get from point A to point B. In a real estate transaction, the level of money and complexity means you have to have a good relationship with your agent. We had to connect the consumer with an agent instantly, but it had to be the right one, so our team built our agent matching algorithm. This allows us to look at millions of pieces of data about the consumer and the agent to ensure that real-time connection results in a good fit that will lead to a close. This all happens in the span of one phone call. In fact, our agent matching algorithm continues to improve and has increased our own close rate 172 percent in the last 12 months alone. 3. Opcity provides real transparency and accountability for online leads to agents, brokers and the industry by staying focused on the consumer. Consumers want the help of an agent. They need to be responded to on their timeline and placed with an agent that is a good fit for them. Agents no longer want leads, they want real, motivated buyers and sellers. Brokers want more visibility into delivering value to their agents and consumers
Most agents didn’t get into real estate because they are experts at online lead conversion. So we had huge problems to address. Too many leads were being generated for agents who have so many other responsibilities that it’s nearly impossible to effectively work online leads without support. Ultimately the consumer, agent and broker were all suffering as a result. We partnered with a brokerage firm in Austin that had made online lead generation and conversion a core strategy and, leveraging 16 years of data, we applied the most successful conversion strategies to the entire national real estate market. In order to do that we raised a $27M series A, one of the largest in central Texas history, to build the team to take this model to the point we are today with over 400 employees in our Austin-based office. Now we serve 50,000 agents, over 5,000 brokerage firms, process hundreds of thousands of leads every month and will help close 20,000 homes in 2018 after less than three years in business. The team at Move, Inc and Realtor.com saw what we were doing, the significant value we brought to the industry and finalized the acquisition of Opcity in October of 2018.
It’s been a rocket ride, and I am proud of our team for joining me on this mission and accomplishing so much in such a short time.
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