Even as a real estate agent, open houses can be stressful. The thousands of forms that get signed and not knowing what demographic each house attracts can be pretty frustrating. What you need, is Spacio Pro. Leading the way in real estate tech, they have created a platform for all administrative management needs including sign-ins, brokerage analytics, branding and the ability to broadcast emails. With their vision to expand to more and more markets, they plan on becoming the go to for real estate agents.
CEO Melissa Kwan talks with AlleyWatch about there stress-saving product and how it will make deals smoother than ever.
Tell us about the product or service.
Spacio Pro is the newest open house lead capture solution on iPad and web. Using Spacio Pro, real estate agents can finally ditch the old pen and paper and offer visitors a delightful sign-in experience on a beautifully designed interface.
How is it different? Why another social network?
Spacio Pro is not only an open house lead management platform for real estate agents, it’s a marketing tool agents use to promote themselves with testimonials integrated directly on the sign-in form powered by RealSatisfied, the leading customer satisfaction platform tailored for the real estate industry. Selling real estate doesn’t stop at capturing potential buyers information. It begins with creating a memorable first impression, then nurturing a potential buyer to finally making a purchase. Spacio Pro’s simple and modern design wows the buyer when they walk in the door, and has features that help agents manage, engage, and convert leads afterwards all on one single platform.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
To start, we are targeting real estate agents in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – there are over 1.5M agents in those countries combined.
What is the business model?
Freemium. Free forever with limited features and $15/month with extended features. Brokerage plans are available for brokerages and brands.
What inspired the business?
After graduating I was in real estate for 3 years and started my career working for a real estate development firm. I had my agent license throughout and did some resales on the side. As a new agent, I built my business hosting open houses for other real estate agents with luxury listings so I know the importance of this practice in real estate. It’s a tough job that still relies on very outdated processes. In the context of open houses, sign-ins are still largely left to pen and paper. The amount of lost business from that is crazy, a lead you didn’t capture because of messy handwriting could have been your next sale.
45% of buyers go to open houses as a source of information, but only 5% of buyers are from open houses; this gap shows that there are lots of opportunities at open houses that aren’t being captured. We wanted to create a solution to help agents convert more leads into buyers; making lead captures at open houses more efficient and effective was the natural first step. We set out to create something that is exponentially better than the current process, which I believe we have achieved. What’s exciting is what comes next, what happens after capturing that lead.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
Collect feedback often and continue to improve our product to help agents run more effective open houses. We have been doing a feature release every 2 weeks for the past 3 months and will continue to do so for the next 6 months in order to create the most holistic and streamlined open house lead capture solution. Expanding to Australia and New Zealand would be nice bonuses to achieve in the next 6 months. We have users in those countries but haven’t done any big rollouts.
What is the one piece of business advice that you never got?
Don’t confuse media attention with customer or market validation. When we first started Spacio we were a lot of shiny things people loved talking about and it’s easy to confuse that excitement with a need in the market. Cutting edge technology takes a lot of execution because it often requires participation from different groups and changes in consumer behavior. By going back to the basics and stripping our open house solution down to the core function of signing-in, we started to get adoption, which is the only market validation a startup needs. If you can find that core function customers see value in, then you can start building features to support it and grow the product from there.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
In real estate, Barbara Corcoran. I really admire the how she’s built her business around herself as a brand and could pick her brain on marketing ideas.
Why did you launch in New York?
New York is the real estate capital of the world and open houses are regular weekend events. I think New York is the best place for any real estate tech company to start; the property market is very active which means there’s need for innovation. There’s also a legitimacy that comes with being in New York, people take you more seriously. I don’t necessarily agree with that mindset but it’s true. Being in New York makes you a “real company”.
What’s is your favorite restaurant in the city?
Desnuda on E 7th and Avenue A. Anyone who has not been there should stop what they’re doing right now and go there immediately.
