New app for the real estate world
Managing a real estate process is extremely detailed, and much of the hard work is never seen by clients, or the public, so the perception remains that Realtors don’t work for their commission. With Merge, agents report listing activities to their seller in an extremely streamlined and beautiful interface, reminiscent of what we imagine an app would look like if Apple and real estate made a baby.
“Real estate agents are constantly having to justify their commission,” explains Joel Beasley, Merge Founder and Developer. “Yet, they’re not doing this effectively. In fact, research indicates that the typical agent communicates only 31% of what they actually do for their sellers. If you’re only explaining 31%, how can you justify 100% of your commission? That’s what I had in mind when I created Merge.”
Communicating tasks and worth
Updates are visible on the “timeline” for each transaction and updates can be sent to you and your clients either daily, weekly, or bi-weekly to allow them to see movement on their listing, even when you’re not ringing their phone.
According to the company, timelines are either built directly by the agent, with the option of templates to save time, or through pulling data from the broker’s real estate software, including accounting tools, showing systems, call centers, transaction management, document management, CRM and more.
Add, track, share. Simple. Super simple.
“Over more than a decade in the real estate technology space, I’ve developed a unique process that allows me to pull data from the numerous platforms used in most brokers’ offices,” Beasley explains. “This solves one of the problems that most real estate professionals face – multiple technology systems that don’t ‘talk’ to each other. And I can even accomplish all this in less than 3 days for any broker’s office.”
Merge is also popular with mortgage, insurance, and title companies, and the company says they are “the answer for individuals and companies who want to provide a level of service and selective transparency that a “fully integrated platform” offers, yet still want to avoid the expense and hassle of more cumbersome software.”
In the near future, Merge will be rolling out a variety of industry-specific widgets to help each user with their unique needs, like the “Email Connector” which pulls emails into the timeline based on keywords or email addresses, “Requests” for obtaining files and info without having to assign a task to a client (which we always thought sounded rude, so thanks for fixing that, Merge), and “Collaboration,” wherein users can create permissions to allow other people to view timelines in a way that allows third parties to only have access to view specific widgets (updates, for example), but not others.
Check in at a property
“I also recognized the highly mobile nature of today’s real estate professional,” said Beasley, “So I made it a priority for my platform to work seamlessly on mobile devices. For example, I’ve added a feature that allows users to ‘check-in’ at a property and have it appear on the timeline for that transaction.”
The app has a week of free use so users can test it out without even sharing a credit card number. Merge aims to help agents to better communicate their value, and with a sexy interface and responsive design (which they don’t brag about enough), this company is most definitely going to disrupt the real estate technology sector.
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