NY Launch Pod: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod. The New York Press Club award-winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith. And this episode, we speak to Rob Pachter co-founder of Realty Crunch, which offers clients and brokers an all in one platform to collaborate and organize the real estate transaction process, whether you’re buying, selling, or renting. And this idea came from Rob’s own experience.
Rob Pachter: The product really came about from the personal buying experience, where in many ways we used to build our own Pinterest walls when looking at properties and realizing that there needs to be a unified technology that’s applied towards real estate to help facilitate this whole discovery process.
NY Launch Pod: But before we go to the interview, if you haven’t already remember to sign up for our monthly newsletter and unique content and insights @nylaunchpod.com and subscribe to the podcast on your favorite listening app, and we have a sponsor RezCue New York’s premier residential rental compliance platform. That’s good because this podcast is all about real estate. Have you rented out residential property in New York State? If so, odds are that you are not compliant with the Housing, Stability and Tenant Protection Act and acted by New York State last year. And if you don’t follow the law, your tenant may be able to legally stay in the property beyond the length of the lease. You won’t be able to increase the rent by the amount you want to, or you may be forced to pay for damages to the property out of your own pocket instead of out of the security deposit. RezCue Is designed to solve all of that and more go to rezcueme.com and enter in some basic lease information and RezCue takes care of the rest. So you can relax and be more profitable. That’s rescueme.com. And with that, let’s go to the interview.
NY Launch Pod: So what is Realty Crunch?
Rob Pachter: Great question, Hal. Realty Crunch is an awesome new technology that we launched in the market. And the best way to describe it is to think about how the company actually came to fruition. Right? And how it came about was my business partner and I, we started buying properties all throughout the country over the last five plus years. And one thing that we recognized when we were buying these properties was that the communication between agents and ourselves as buyers was chaotic and all over the place, we were constantly getting bombarded with all different emails and text messages, all of these links of properties that we should check out. And then we had to take that information, share it with our partners, discuss whether or not we should invest in this deal, relay the message back. And there’s just a massive game of telephone. So the best way to think about Realty Crunch is almost like a perfect marriage. Pinterest meets text messaging for real estate agents, where you can easily build a wall, which is very similar to a Pinterest board, which is a collection of properties that you can aggregate through all over the internet, put it under one centralized place and have the ability to share it with your clients. So it’s the best collaboration tool right now for real estate agent.
NY Launch Pod: A perfect marriage. I kind of like that analogy. My question is how come no one ever thought of this before?
Rob Pachter: That’s a great question. So I think there has been a couple of companies that have taken a stab at it. There’s actually, as everyone knows, a big company in the industry called Compass, that is a technology driven brokerage. They do have a similar product, which is called Collections. It’s their collaboration tool. And we like to say that this is a Compass Collections for anyone who’s outside of Compass on steroids. And the good thing about the product is we come from a buyer’s experience. So the product itself is geared towards making the discovery fun as well as helping the streamlined communication, which in return makes the deal close faster as a result.
NY Launch Pod: So I understand that that’s part of the user experience and that that’s beneficial to you. I’m just wondering why can’t individual brokerage firms do what you’re doing and build something for their customer, or maybe you’re exploring white labeling what you’re doing.
Rob Pachter: Yeah. So we’re definitely in the process of working with a lot of the big brokerages across the country and especially here in New York where we’re based to leverage the technology when it comes to communication and collaboration with their clients. Traditionally speaking, a lot of these agents rely on sources like Gmail and text messaging and so on and so forth to send these properties. And what we do is we also give the agents the ability to create these private walls and be able to share them in a very seamless and organized manner, and then streamline all the communication under one centralized place that allows it to be contextually relevant. So you don’t have to go through that painful exercise anymore of, I sent my client 10 properties, next thing you know, I’m getting an email from a client saying, Hey, can you send me a floor plan on this? Or can you, what does this look like on this property? And you have to search through all your emails and figure out what you discussed, what you didn’t discuss. Everything’s organized into one place. And it’s because we’re a technology driven shop, right? We’re not a listing service. We have no aspirations to become a listing service we’re just a true technology shop and helping the agents really just streamline and facilitate proper conversations with their clients.
NY Launch Pod: So you’re very technology focused. I get that. It certainly seems like it’s part of the user interface. How did you go about building?
Rob Pachter: Yeah, so I can’t speak on behalf of getting my hands dirty and building the product. Unfortunately. I am not a developer engineer. I am just more of the, I guess, front facing business side of the equation. But our team is super solid and actually my partner who’s the founder of the business is an absolute rockstar. This is his fourth technology shop. So he’s not a newbie when it comes to building technology that we have. We have a pretty sizeable team right now of 10 engineers that going about building the product. And once again, the product really came about from the personal buying experience, where in many ways we used to build our own Pinterest walls when looking at properties and realizing that there needs to be a unified technology that’s applied towards real estate to help facilitate this whole discovery process. And we essentially eat our own dog food, which is, we basically built it because as buyers, we wanted to use it. And then we’re like, wow, if we’re experiencing this as buyers, putting ourselves in an agent’s shoes where you’re dealing with 10x the amount of clients across 10x amount of the properties, and this must be insane. And yeah, that was definitely how everything really started to coming to fruition.
NY Launch Pod: So from an agent side or maybe a purchaser side, how much quicker can an agent sell a property or can a purchaser find their property that they want to purchase?
Rob Pachter: Yeah. So because we’re not a listing company, it’s not like buyers are coming to our platform to search for properties, right? They’re going throughout their whole experience. Anyway, they’re going through the consumer journey. We’re just enabling them and giving them a tool which allows them to aggregate these properties and have the ability to make decisions on these properties. Also invite their husband, wife, family member, whoever to the wall, which is our Pinterest board, where they can all collaborate and communicate on these different properties. So because everything becomes very streamlined and organized. We see between agent and buyer or renter, not only do you see the engagement increased significantly, but because the communication is very streamlined and back and forth, and you really get to understand what your client’s needs are, we do see that the deal flow has been way quicker by using our technology as a result of communication. And we get these sound bites from our agents that are using our tools and saying, hey, thank you so much for introducing this to us because not only were you able to stay on top of the conversations that are happening, but we’re able to streamline them and expedite them, which creates a lot of efficacy when it comes to closing these deals.
NY Launch Pod: And do you have any data on how much quicker that deal flow gets completed?
Rob Pachter: Yeah. So from what we gathered and keep in mind, we’re less than a year old company in terms of being in market. So I’m sure we’ll get a lot more data. And especially with the last couple of months with COVID, I’m sure that everyone across the board, the deal flow has been a little slower than usual, but the data points and metrics that we have seen is that we have seen a 60% increase of engagement rate as a result of utilizing the tool versus the traditional archaic processes that these agents do use.
NY Launch Pod: And what is that engagement rate based on?
Rob Pachter: The best thing is as an agent, you have an app. So everything that we do, not only can you do on the desktop, but you also have an app and you’re getting real time, push notifications, every single time a buyer renter clicks on a property, they can tag properties, which is a great way for them to give a quick like reaction of what they think about it. They can comment, they can do all this fun stuff. And as a result of that, we see that because they’re always in the know that the deal flow and the closing happens way quicker as a result of that.
NY Launch Pod: And how are you getting agents to use the platform?
Rob Pachter:\ That’s an excellent question. I ask myself that all the time. We have an awesome technology and we hear this all the time we get fan emails, thanking us for introducing such amazing tools. Recently, we also launched an amazing feature here, which is our smart forms product, which we can talk about, which has been really saving a lot of these agents, not only time but has also expedited a lot of the processes in order to show listings and show properties and all that stuff. So it’s been interesting,
NY Launch Pod: You’re getting fan mail, but in terms of getting agents, you talk about the increase of engagement. What are you able to do to get them on?
Rob Pachter: Yeah, so it’s been very, I guess, organic, so we haven’t spent a dollar yet in terms of online marketing, to be honest, I don’t even know if that would work for us in our technology. We’ve been able to just strike the right relationships. We get in front of the right agents that believe, and really love the technology. And it’s just virality. So as a result of that, we’ve been able to strike partnerships with the right organizations and they just tell their colleagues. And, yeah, we’ve been able to just bring people on to the platform to use the tool as a result of that. And then I think we also have a great feedback loop with our customers, which allows us to continue to improve and enhance the product, which makes it more, I guess, engaging for these agents.
NY Launch Pod: And where does the product stand now? Is it nationwide or is it just in New York?
Rob Pachter: It’s nationwide. We do have agents in Colorado and California in Florida and Jersey and Georgia using the product, but we’ve been super focused and lasered in, in New York. I think we’ve been able to establish the right relationships here. And for us, we’re cultivating these relationships before we spread ourselves too thin. But today the technology works across the US and actually to be completely candid, we have randomly agents in the UK using our technology, in Australia using our technology, in Singapore using our technology. So it’s a universal tool that literally works on any sort of .com. So we do see that there is activity across multiple geographies, but we are laser focused in New York today with the goal of really focusing on other States within the US over the next couple of years.
NY Launch Pod: So you have a nationwide reach, an international reach, but focused in New York. Talk about a little bit in terms of developing a real estate product in New York and what being in New York has meant to you?
Rob Pachter: Yeah. So I’m a native I’m originally from New York. And then based on I guess the last couple of businesses that I’ve been a part of I actually moved out to Asia. So I was living there. So I’m happy to be back and yeah, being in New York, being a New York company, it’s incredible for us. The New York market has about 10% of the volume transactions that happen every single year. You have the market that’s very, very complex and complicated, but at the end of the day, if you can do it here, you can do it anywhere. So we’re very confident and happy where we’re at as an organization. And we’ve been able to have a lot of great supporters behind us here in New York. So it’s been good for us.
NY Launch Pod: And you’ve talked about your wonderful features, how much does your product cost?
Rob Pachter: Awesome question. So right now our product is free until the end of this year, starting January of 2021.
NY Launch Pod: I like that.
Rob Pachter: Yeah. So, we’re a technology driven shop, right? So it’s not our first rodeo and starting January of 2021, we’re introducing our pricing, we’ll have a freemium product, which essentially is going to be different tiers. So we’ll have one tier that’s free, we’ll have another tier that’s going to be $6.99 cents a month and then a premium tier, which is going to be $9.99 cents a month. And then we’re also working with big brokerages to work on enterprise level deals, but that is the pricing infrastructure that we have set up starting January of 2021.
NY Launch Pod: So free. That’s a wonderful price, at least in terms of onboarding folks, you also mentioned a smart forms feature. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
Rob Pachter: Yes. So here in New York, as a lot of agents probably recognized and dealt with and are super frustrated about, there’s a lot of mandatory statewide disclosure forms that have to be sent out in order to show a property. And this ranges from a COVID Health Screening and Liability Form all the way down to the Fair Housing and Agency Disclosure Forms and with everything that’s going on in this crazy time that we’re living in, these agents need to send out these forms per property, per client, the traditional way of doing it was going through a technology like a DocuSign, which has built an awesome technology, but it is pretty cumbersome and time consuming when you have to send out these forms per client, per property, which on an average we heard from our clients that it takes 10 minutes to do where you have to take this PDF, upload it drag and drop different tech boxes and say you need to sign here so on and so forth. And there’s also a lot of room for error with our technology. The best way to think about our smart forms is almost like a DocuSign 2.0, where you can send all these disclosures that you need on the go, whether it’s through the app or whether it’s through the desktop and less than 30 seconds. So it’s been super exciting for us knowing that we’re providing a lot of value for the community in these crazy times where everyone’s trying to figure out how they can continue to drive business momentum, and we’re enabling them to do it in a very easy manner. So that’s been very exciting for us. And, yeah, that’s the product that I want to highlight today and we’ll be continuing to innovate. I mean, because we’re technology guys, we come at this industry from a very different lens and a very different angle, and we’ll continue to innovate with all different types of product offerings. In the near future, I guess this would kind of be cool for this podcast. And for this episode, we are going to be releasing a feature in the next couple of weeks, which is a contact list QR code for agents for open houses. So very similar to when you rock up to a restaurant now in New York, the only way for you to get access to the menu is to take your phone and scan over a QR code and figure out what you want to eat. And it’s going to be very similar to open houses here in New York, we’ll create a custom QR code for agents that they can show and their clients can come in, scan the QR code, plug in the information and send it to the agent and don’t have to exchange any sort of paperwork or even touching anyone else’s phone or iPad. So it’s going to be contactless, which has been big for agents here in New York.
NY Launch Pod: Exciting features for certain, you have Pinterest covered, you have DocuSign covered, you have QR codes. We look forward to seeing more in terms of what Realty Crunch does. Rob, how do people find out more about you and Realty Crunch?
Rob Pachter: Yes, that’s an excellent question. So for everyone listening, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time and listening and Hal thank you so much for organizing it. It’s been super exciting. You can go to www.realtycrunch.io and feel free to join. Also, my email address is very simple. It’s just rob@realtycrunch.io. So, feel free to shoot me over a note for anyone who wants to ask additional questions.
NY Launch Pod: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media@nylaunchpod, and for transcripts of every episode, including this one, you can go to nylaunchpod.com. And if you are a super fan, Robert, are you a super fan of the New York Launch Pod?
Rob Pachter: I am.
NY Launch Pod: If you’re a super fan like Rob, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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