There are two complaints about the traditional real estate process; it can be somewhat slow and costly. Unreal Estate aims to change all that by bringing real estate into the 21st century. They’re shaking up the industry by digitizing transactions to increase efficiency and save their clients money. And, behind the scenes, they’re using ATTOM data to power it.
Here’s a closer look at how it works:
Taking on Real Estate with Efficiency in Mind
Before Kyle Stoner, Founder and CEO of online real estate firm Unreal Estate, ran startups, he got his start in the auto industry. His job was to watch people assemble automobiles and to help them find ways to work more quickly. Since measuring improvement was his main focus, he soon became very skilled at analyzing processes and streamlining them to maximize efficiency.
Years later, he’s applied those same skills to the real estate industry.
“Buying or selling a home is traditionally a very manual process. Your real estate agent has to manage all these third parties, like home inspectors and appraisers, through phone calls, texts, or emails,” explains Stoner. “It’s all very time-consuming, which is part of why agents charge such high commissions. I thought that there had to be a better way.”
In 2017, he launched Abode, which focused on helping people buy homes more efficiently by digitizing many outdated manual processes. By 2022, the company rebranded as Unreal Estate and started bringing that experience to buyers and sellers.
Leveraging Efficiency to Help Real Estate Buyers and Sellers Save
However, with Unreal Estate’s launch, Stoner was clear that he wasn’t just trying to make real estate more efficient as a thought experiment. He believed that added efficiency could ultimately lead to substantial cost savings on either side of the transaction.
To illustrate his point, he shared a glimpse into how Unreal Estate streamlines agents’ responsibilities to speed up the real estate process:
“We have a dashboard that pulls all the transaction pieces together. Since our agents don’t have to worry about keeping track of everything or about generating new business, they can focus on what they do best, advising our clients. It makes them close to 10x as productive as the traditional real estate agent.”
That increase in productivity has brought Unreal Estate much success, which they can share with their clients in the form of added savings. According to the company’s website, the flat-fee brokerage has helped serve 36K satisfied clients and contributed to putting $528M back in the pockets of those buyers and sellers. On average, the company believes its clients save over $11K per transaction.
Using Data to Power their Streamlined Real Estate Transactions
Another part of that cost savings comes from clients taking a more active role in the real estate process. For example, rather than having an agent create an MLS listing for each listed property, Unreal Estate has its sellers make their listing when they sign up for the marketplace.
To keep their clients’ workloads manageable, Stoner and his colleagues knew they would have to make use of technology. Specifically, they knew they had to leverage automation to make the process as painless as possible. Stoner explains:
“When we first started, if you wanted to list your home, you would have to fill out dozens and dozens of form fields with all the applicable listing information. But, now, a seller can put in their property address, and their form fills in with data from the MLS. The seller can go through and answer a series of yes-or-no questions to validate the data and have their home fully listed in just a few minutes.”
In addition to the MLS data, they also utilize recent sale data to give sellers an idea of how to price their properties effectively. Further, neighborhood characteristic data helps give buyers a better idea of which homes might be the right fit for them.
Partnering with ATTOM to Access the Data they Need
When they were looking for a vendor to provide them with the required real estate data, Stoner stated that his team looked at multiple providers, but ultimately ATTOM was their chosen data partner as they grew.
“We kept coming back to ATTOM because of the breadth and thoroughness of their data. We’re a national real estate company, and ATTOM’s data allows us to cover the whole country at once,” he explains. Plus, the data is cost-effective, and their API was much easier to use than some of the others in the market.”
Looking into the future, Stoner believes that Unreal Estate will continue to grow and maximize how much of the real estate process can be digitized to produce savings. He feels that ATTOM will be by their side as they continue that drive to expansion.
“We’ve been partners [with ATTOM] for a long time and, as we grow, I think we’ll pick up more services from them. They have a lot to offer, and we’re well-aligned.”
