By Riley Kaminer
Leveraging tech to bring efficiencies to a traditional market is in David H. Friedman’s veins. Even as a pre-law student in college in the 90s, he was enthralled by the process of playing around with servers and building websites.
After a year of law school, Friedman returned to the world of computing, working in an IT department. Eventually, he would undertake an MBA – leading him to a 15-year stint at American Express as a product manager before joining Ryder Systems here in Miami.
Now, Friedman is working on his own project inspired by a realization after years in the product field: “It’s not just innovate or die – it’s automate or die.”
Friedman has his sights set on one industry that has a particularly acute need to automate: real estate. Alongside three other employees, Friedman is building Smarter Offers. The goal, in Friedman’s words: “To provide a complete closed loop to fully digitize the buying and selling real estate experience across all consumer and agent touch points.”
The first stop on this journey is digitizing a 12-page contract that has over 100 fields that need to be completed each time a buyer wants to create an offer. Smarter Offers’ system automatically inputs as much relevant information as possible, saving agents’ time. Long gone are the days of spending hours toiling away on a computer after a long day of showings.
The company also offers a pre-approval workflow offering: a standardized education and document managed tool to ensure that offers are backed up with the right documentation.
There is also a data play to Smarter Offers. For example, buyers and agents create profiles that enable the two parties to better know each other. “We keep the agent at the center of the transaction,” so they stay top of mind when a buyer or seller is ready to enter the real estate market, Friedman told Refresh Miami.
Looking forward though, Friedman is excited by the prospect of aggregating all this data to help buyers understand the likelihood an offer will be accepted before they even submit any paperwork. “I just think that data transparency doesn’t exist yet,” when it comes to making real estate offers, said Friedman. “And if I have enough volume going through my platform, I can start to provide that.”
So far, 115 realtors have expressed interest in being onboarded to Smarter Offers’ platform. The startup is focused on attracting the 60,000 realtors in Miami and, eventually, the 240,000 realtors in Florida.
Smarter Offers is currently leveraging a ‘freemium’ business model, but Friedman signaled an interest in partnering with auxiliary firms to advertise their services to Smarter Offers’ users. The platform has been bootstrapped up to now and is in late-stage beta.
“The value here is as a digital extension of an agent’s flow with the buyer,” asserted Friedman. And this is just the first step in that direction.
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- Buy, rent, sell, manage: Miami’s proptech ecosystem may be as hot as our real estate market
- Get ready for Getaway: Real estate investing you can actually enjoy
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