How iBuyers WILL Affect You

By Jack Burns

Palm Springs, CA, March 28, 2018 – The group discussion at the Inman event was thought provoking, but I felt all fidgety in my seat. Brad Inman had asked the group: “How can agents participate in the exploding iBuyer space?”

In case you haven’t heard, iBuyers like Opendoor, who’s about to close yet another round for $200 million (bringing their raise to $1.2 billion in capital and debt) are expanding into new markets with their “instant offers.” Amy Bohutinsky, COO at Zillow chimed-in about their Instant Offers, saying how much they support and benefit their premier agents. She kept the ‘cat in the bag’ about their April 12, 2018 announcement: Zillow is now flipping houses themselves. Their iBuyer test in Orlando was apparently successful, where they passed the seller leads on to their “15 Wall Street Investors.” As it turned out, Zillow was working with Offerpad, another iBuyer

behemoth, to receive their seller leads. Now with Zillow doing the actual buying, Offerpad loses that lead source. Reflecting on the somewhat stoic comment to Brad’s question from Jerry Coleman, CEO of Offerpad, it now seems a little more interesting. Did he know about Zillow’s plans a month before they announced it?

Brad gave me a glance, but I kept quiet about our own plans. More on that in a minute. First, let’s contemplate how iBuyers will affect you, the flipper/investor, hard money lender, loan officer, agent, staging company, or any other provider of real estate related services. If you think inventory is hard to come by now, wait until a couple of deep-pocketed iBuyers land in your backyard to battle it out with massive ad budgets and a fine-tuned online message to homeowners. They’re offering the same thing investors have been doing forever… the promise of a quick and easy, hassle-free close. But how do you think your road signs, car wraps, direct mail, door-knocking, etc. will fare against their online offer platform and multi-million-dollar ad budgets? Oh, there’ll be opportunities for some (in a couple categories) to align with the giants. But if you miss out on that, you might want to consider a day job.

At that leadership event, sitting there all fidgety, I felt like a tiny mouse near a pride of lions… thinking the big iBuyers might perk up and grab a snack if I drew attention to myself. I chose to let them lounge a little longer while we grew into something more troublesome than a mouse.

We’re now about jackal size, having closed our first deal (with $0 advertising) and a potential threat to a few morsels of their kills. Wait until they realize we’re not just one jackal, but about 100,000 strong by the end of the year.

Alright, enough ‘circling the wagons.’ I’m officially entering the iBuyer space with an ‘offer-bot.’ offerAI helps investors and agents discover inventory because unlike other iBuyers, we provide both agents and investors with the fruits of their marketing on our platform.

Key differentiators:

  1. Our offer-bot makes offers without the user having to talk to a human.
  2. The offers are truly instant…5 minutes rather than in 24-48 hours.
  3. We wholesale the contracts, allowing us to operate without raising $1 billion.
  4. We can be in all markets almost overnight because we don’t need to be there.
  5. Our distribution sources are the agents and investors who benefit from the leads.

Here’s how it works: Potential sellers land on the site, enter an address and the bot starts asking questions. We use image comparisons to adjust the amount up or down and the homeowner gets a genuine offer in just a couple of minutes. If they accept the offer, our system automatically generates a Series LLC as the purchaser and provides the seller with a PSA to electronically sign. Then we have a human evaluate the deal and wholesale that LLC to an investor (like you). But let’s face it, the lion’s share of the sellers will be listing leads because most of the offers will be unacceptable. So agents (like you) can get all the listing leads, without even a referral fee! How do we do that? We allow agents (like you) to create their own unique URL, i.e. www.offerai.com/karenmelvin so all the listing leads from that URL will go to Karen (you). Now we’ve created an incentive for Karen to either promote her own iBuyer page or subscribe to one of our marketing packages and we’ll promote that page for her. Any agent or investor can use us as their own iBuyer platform!

Now you can fight back against the iBuyer tsunami on the horizon by becoming one yourself!

See why I was fidgety?

Feel free to try out our offer-bot at offerAI.com. Patent Pending. Copyright © 2018  [email protected] 855-711-1555

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