The latest in real estate technology news.
Asteroom 3D Tour Technology Powers 2020 Homebuying
Asteroom, the first smartphone-based provider of mobile 3-D tours and home imaging for real estate professionals, is ending an impressive yet tumultuous year that saw the imaging startup disrupt the 3D tour space with monumental growth.
“At the time of our launch in September of 2019 we knew that 3D tours would become ubiquitous in the real estate industry,” said Eric Tsai, CEO and co-founder of Asteroom. “What we didn’t know was how that would be accelerated this year due to Covid-19. Our focus has and always will be on empowering the real estate agent, and we were honored that our partners were able to use Asteroom to help their clients.”
Capping off a year that included partnering with more than 15 brokerages nationwide, Asteroom announced in late October a partnership with Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Fox & Roach. This partnership brings Asteroom’s proprietary 3D tour technology to more than 5,500 real estate professionals serving Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and Delaware.
Asteroom also upgraded its offering with the addition of virtual staging options and enterprise options. Asteroom remains the most affordable option for real estate professionals: For $59, the Asteroom imaging package offers 180 days of hosting, 3D dollhouse, 2D floor plan and image enhancement. Combined with the $99 hardware, this barrier of entry is drastically less than any other 3D tour competitor in the space.
Maronda Homes First Homebuilder to Offer Offerpad’s Full Suite of Services to Home Buyers
Offerpad announces the immediate availability of its pioneering home listing solution through Maronda Homes, the first of the company’s strategic homebuilder partners to offer the service to new-construction customers.
In its second year as a partner in Offerpad’s Homebuilder Alliance program, Maronda Homes now offers homebuyers listing and direct sale solutions when purchasing a new build. Available exclusively through Offerpad’s Real Estate Solutions Center, listing a home with Offerpad provides buyers with free concierge services and an optional back-up cash offer on their current home.
Since launching its Solutions Center in June 2020, Offerpad has aggressively adapted its offerings to make them available to meet the unique needs of its homebuilder partners and their buyers. Kyle Rush, National Director of Offerpad’s Homebuilder Alliance, says:
Offerpad and Maronda Homes, after more than a year of cooperation, are partnered in over 50 communities throughout Florida. Offerpad’s home purchases through Maronda Homes have more than tripled. The company is widening its service area to meet the builder’s needs – most recently by expanding into Port St. Lucie and the surrounding coastal area. Direct sale and listing solutions can be extended to Maronda Homes’ buyers with homes most anywhere Offerpad operates, in or outside of their overlapping Florida markets. The listing option will also be available to Offerpad’s other homebuilder partners and their buyers over the coming months.
Spruce launches new digital tool for real-estate closings amid proptech industry boom that’s pushed traditional home buying and selling online
Spruce, a real-estate tech company that creates digital closing tools for residential transactions, is launching a white-label version of its closing service.
Called SprucePowered, the software will allow proptech companies to create their own title agencies, bringing the entire closing process into their own firms without having to build their own solutions or acquire digital closing companies.
NORCAL MLS Alliance Launches One-Stop Access to Property Listing Data for Northern California Real Estate Professionals
Northern California real estate brokers, agents, and appraisers now have one-stop single-login access to thousands of listings throughout 22 counties* spanning from the Greater Bay Area and Silicon Valley, reaching as far south as Monterey County, and up through the Central Valley to Sacramento and Nevada. Seven leading California MLSs** comprising the NORCAL MLS Alliance (www.norcalmlsalliance.com) collaborated to create a new and efficient way to provide MLS users with easy access to property listings throughout a vast geographic area with one simple login from their respective MLS platforms. What this means for homebuyers and sellers is expanded property listing search options and more marketing exposure for their properties.
Rockport VAL’s API is Driving New Efficiencies for Commercial Real Estate Valuation Professionals
Rockport VAL™ , the award-winning CRE Cash Flow Modeling & Valuation platform, announces enhanced API integration technology in its underwriting SaaS platform. VAL’s API redefines property cashflow modeling, valuation, and appraisal report generation by making the integration process friction-free.
“The market has long been saddled with awkward interfaces,” said Rick Trepp, VAL’s founder and CEO. “The VAL API offers what the industry has been begging for over the past decade – an enterprise class property cashflow modeling and valuation tool, which plays well with third party systems and integrates in real time.”
Many of the world’s leading commercial real estate institutions including brokerage firms, lenders, appraisers, owners/investors, and due diligence providers are imbedding VAL into their workflow and leveraging VAL’s API to automate – and seamlessly push and pull data to meet their growing needs.
Recently, Realquantum, one of the premier commercial property appraisal software platforms, integrated with VAL to give fee appraisers, assessors, and other commercial real estate valuation professionals the ability to seamlessly feed discounted cash flow and valuation results directly into their appraisal reports. The connection of the two platforms is another example of VAL’s mission to serve as a medium-of-exchange across the vast number of solutions that serve the commercial real estate industry.