Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Sometimes you need a real estate professional’s help. You need him to give you some options by showing you a number of properties you might buy or rent; you need him to give you some extra info; you may even count on his or hers advice. But in other occasions, you know exactly what you want, what you need, where you want to buy/rent and you would definitely like to skip the intermediate and work directly with the owner/landlord. And you should know that you can do that with the help of the Oliver application.
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This iOS app eliminates the middleman and helps you rent an apartment in New York City. The app aggregates information directly from the landlords and you contact them directly. In this way, Oliver connects the renters with the landlords.
Moreover, the app helps schedule a time to meet with the landlord.
Oliver was created by tech expert Yossi Shemesh and real estate developer Amir Shriki and it looks like it is an app that will have a long life.
“I found out that the real estate inventory is out there and can be aggregated. We invested money in the project and I started building a prototype with a team of developers – a machine that aggregates all real estate inventory directly from the landlord’s data sources,” declared Shemesh for TechCrunch. “In August 2014, we ran the first proof-of-concept – we hired a bunch of interns to connect users with the landlords and built a slim web based version of our product. We had dozens of showings per day that converted to real rentals – we stopped the POC and started the seed round.”
The app (and its inventors) managed to draw $1 million in its seed round, so this is definitely an app that will continue to grow.
Oliver is an app to try when looking for an apartment and want to save some bucks by cutting the brokers. Is this an app for anyone? Probably not. Those who are not in the mood to go on various meetings without knowing which landlord is OK, what facilities each apartment has and so on, will probably go with the brokers. But those who want to save that rent cut the brokers get, and use it to buy something else, will definitely use the app.
This is an app to check out in the future as well, to see how it developed, notice the feedback people offered and the results: will it be successful on a long term? Will it start to include other cities?
Time will tell.
