Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Open Listings, the home listings website that wants to do away with traditional real estate agents, has just raised $6.5 million in a Series A funding round, and says it will use the money to expand its operations.
Matrix Partners led the round, with participation from Initialized Capital and Arena Ventures.
To recap, Open Listings describes itself as an end-to-end real estate platform aimed at buyers. The idea is that people can search through listings, book private showings, make an offer and do all of the necessary paperwork via the platform before completing a sale.
More crucially, Open Listings does most of this without relying on real estate agents. It doesn’t completely do away with agents, but the process is segmented so that agents only play a very specific role in transactions. The main advantage of this, from a buyer’s perspective, is that they can enjoy big savings that would have otherwise gone on agent’s fees. Open Listings does, however, take a cut of the transaction fee, but this is much smaller than what an agent would demand.
The main task of agents who work with Open Listings is to actually handle the property viewings. Open Listings says agents typically do so in their free time in order to make some extra cash. Everything else is handled by the company itself, however.
TechCrunch, which first reported the new funding round, says the company is currently licensed to operate in California and Washington states, and will add two more states later this year.
Good luck getting professional full time real estate agents with area knowledge "to handle the property viewings for extra cash." Anyone can turn a key, but there's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes to get a transaction to closing, often times troubleshooting along the way. The old saying "you get what you pay for" comes to mind. ?