BY JIM DALRYMPLE II AND CRAIG C. ROWE

Published on Inman.com

October 13, 2022

All week, Inman is taking a Deep Dive into eXp Realty. We’ll be covering the brokerage’s annual EXPCON event — taking place virtually and in Las Vegas this week. Stay tuned in the coming days for more on eXp, and for future Inman Deep Dives into top brokerages.

Glenn Sanford, the founder and CEO of eXp World Holdings, announced Thursday that his company is on the verge of releasing a new app that is designed to guide consumers through their real estate journey.

The app is called 360 Home and will begin rolling out in November. Sanford announced the new app while on stage at EXPCON, his company’s annual gathering that is taking place in Las Vegas. Among other things, Sanford said the app will be “our app, it’s only going to our agents,” and that it’ll have both eXp and agent-specific branding.

A slide shared on stage with Sanford showed the app’s interface, which includes a portal-like home search tool, a saved homes feature and a home value estimator. The slide also stated the app will provide consumers with information about market trends and allow them to collaborate with their agents.

Though Sanford billed the new app as a unique solution for eXp, tech firm Inside Real Estate built the tool as part of CORE Home, an enterprise software application billed as a long-term solution to link homeowner transactions. CORE Home is designed to inherently have branding and feature flexibility, which allowed it to be adapted and customized for eXp.

The software was designed to bridge the time period between purchase and sale, keeping clients tethered to their agents. While a number of software products exist to address this long-known challenge, CORE Home offers some unique features that rise above typical tactics, such as agent-labeled maintenance reminders and applicable upkeep alerts.

In an Inman review of CORE Home, the product was described as a method to keep homeowners consistently aware of their markets and educated on what affects their roles as participants in the real estate economy.

EXp already provides Inside Real Estate’s kvCORE customer relationship manager (CRM) to agents.

For Thursday’s announcement, Inside Real Estate CEO Joseph Skousen also appeared on stage with Sanford, saying that for consumers the new app will put the whole “homeownership lifecycle in the palm of their hand.” He also compared the app to a “pizza tracker” — a feature on websites of companies, such as Dominos Pizza that lets users track the progress of their food as its made.

A pizza tracker-like tool has long been a dream of many real estate executives — Josh Team mentioned the concept back in 2020 when he was president of Keller Williams — and Thursday’s eXp announcement hints at how the idea continues to catch fire in the industry.

In an interview with Inman Thursday, Seth Siegler — eXp’s vice president of technology innovation and real estate — further outlined the new app. Among other things, he said the app will differ from other technology options in the industry, because it will focus on nurturing rather than on lead generation or getting people to sign up for something.

For example, one way the app will nurture, Siegler explained, is that if a user puts in a price range in a home search, the app will treat that range with some flexibility — potentially offering homes just outside the consumer’s target. The idea is that consumers don’t end up missing homes, nor are they flooded with irrelevant listings because they had to set their parameters far too high

“The automation built within kvCORE will pull consumers directly into CORE Home, via property alerts, market reports and other proactive engagement [methods] that drive consumer interaction automatically, on behalf of the agent,” Inside Real Estate said in a statement Thursday.

Siegler added that the app “ties into the CRM product that we already use. So this is part of a larger kind of engagement.”

Additionally, the platform can tap into Inside Real Estate’s connection to more than 250,000 IDX websites, meaning there’s little it can’t share about the market with homeowners.

EXp has been working with Inside Real Estate on the app for about 10 months, Siegler said.

Inside Real Estate said in its statement that on average, using its software produces a 5-10x lift in consumer engagements over industry norms. The add-on of 360 Home has shown that clients are 30x more likely to engage their selling agent, based on early results.

But it should be noted that until a measurable transaction volume between the same clients and agents can be recorded, these long-play solutions remain open to scrutiny. That said, CORE Home’s approach does appeal to the modern homeowner’s ongoing concern about value, adjacent sales activity and mortgage rates.

The initial rollout will make the app available to eXp agents who are already using kvCORE. Consumers will find it after being prompted to do so by their eXp agents, though Siegler said that over time people may organically download the app without being existing eXp clients.

“It’s designed for the current customers of an agent, and then eventually a current homeowner,” Siegler concluded.

In the statement from Inside Real Estate, Sanford ultimately said he was “thrilled to expand our partnership with Inside Real Estate.”

“This innovative solution solidifies the long-term relationship between our agents and their customers,” he added, “by putting them at the center of every stage of the homeownership lifecycle in the easiest way possible.”