When it comes to real estate, people love to pull out their favourite adage, ‘Location, location, location’. But, if you’ve been paying even slight attention to the recent Canadian market, you know that a more apt maxim might simply be, ‘Demand, demand, demand’.
And developers and buyers are both struggling to deal with it.
“Why does e-commerce work in every other industry? Because it’s simple,” says Ben Smith, President of AVESDO.
And what isn’t yet ‘simple’ is the current process of buying real estate online. But AVESDO is trying to change that. In fact, their soon-to-market “Selection Worksheets Process,” within their popular Transaction Management Platform (TMS), digitizes one of the most important aspects of the buying process – initial intent – and allows for a win-win situation while saving valuable time.
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“Early in my career it was basically a war room, right? You’d lay all the pieces of paper out with buyer home requests, and you’d have all these systems for sorting, and there’s probably a bunch of people there, and you’re all trying to figure out who gets what. And the salespeople might be arguing over ‘my client needs to get this,’ and it was just a big process,” Smith explains.
But fast forward to 2022, and the process no longer needs to be a multi-day effort consisting of confusion and potential human error. Processing thousands of worksheets unit requests can now be done in hours, efficiently maximizing yield while reducing the cost, risk, and complexity of worksheets and offering unmatched control and visibility over demand before sales even start.
If time truly is money, AVESDO seems to have found a way to marry the two.
The Cost of Doing Business
Ben Smith is in a war with paper.
“There are still some people out there who will say, ‘I’ll just use paper’… which is the craziest thing. [We’re talking about] massive transactions worth significant amounts of money; the cost of an error is not small.”
Smith’s point is that the digitization of real estate processes will cut out the archaic mistakes inherent in relying on copy after copy, form after form, being filled out by hand. A human hand.
“Buying a home is different from nearly every other transaction, you don’t simply walk into a store and say, ‘I’ll take that one, thanks’,” Smith points out. “In new home sales there’s more to it… you may know you are interested in the project and have identified the floorplan you want, but you need to drill into the specific unit and you need help from a sales person knowing what’s available. And, before you can even commit, you need to purchase a bank draft, complete a lengthy contract and review disclosures.”
So, the ability to have a potential buyer or their realtor simply jump on their phone to fill out all the necessary info to demonstrate their intent and interest in a unit, and then have that info immediately passed directly on to the developer who can convert interest into a contract with a few clicks, may be as close to a game-changer (admittedly, Smith hates the word) as 2022 has in store for pre-construction efficiency.
Admittedly, developers have been moving much of the PC experience online, showcasing their current projects with beautiful 3D renderings. The missing link, though, has been in a buyer’s ability to initiate and complete the sale digitally.
“We built our sales module to work seamlessly with our inventory management system independent of a developer's existing digital assets, all in a simplified way, to make it possible to work on a mobile without the need for fancy sales office computers or heavy bandwidth, which buyers don’t often have…. it’s really simple for a buyer/realtor to complete a unit request wherever and whenever they are ready to do,” Smith says.
AVESDO
With such a simplified process, a developer can expect to receive even more expressions of interest, so in addition to simplified sorting tools on completed requests, AVESDO created their system to allow developers more options for who – and how – they invite submissions in the first place. (Want to showcase specific units to a specific group, with specific submission deadlines and priority? No problem.)
As Smith aptly points out, “The ability to receive, sort, and manage a significant number of home requests, in a way that makes it easy for buyers and realtors to submit their interest and have it be fulfilled, will save hours and hours of time and hassle, making for a better experience for everyone.
Like we said, a win-win.
AVESDO will be launching a Worksheets beta release for select clients in January, and will be launching to the rest of the market formally thereafter.
This article was produced in partnership with STOREYS Custom Studio.
