New App Strives to Be Better Than Zillow

SAN DIEGO—Locally based RealStir Inc. is in the beta stages of launching an eponymous home-search technology platform that the firm says tries to “put the agents back in power” and “will revolutionize the real estate platform world.” The technology compares itself to those offered by Zillow and Trulia, but offers a variety of features that distinguish itself from its competitors by going deeper and giving real estate agents the real-time property information buyers need to make decisions.

“We're targeting many verticals within real estate, first residential and then commercial,” Walid Romaya, CEO of RealStir, tells GlobeSt.com. “We're a marketplace, not a search engine—we're entering the marketplace/portal business.”

Romaya says the portal aggregates listings from many sources and puts them into one funnel, then combines the listings with local, time-sensitive content and communication between buyers and professionals. The phone application allows users to geotag themselves, see their listing, see the agent advertising the listing, chat with them in real time and even submit an inquiry.

“We feel that real estate has been in a time capsule, and the technological, innovation and other industries have surpassed it,” says Romaya. “In other industries, there's a revolution going on in the mobile space, a convergence of search, local data and mobility. We're using the same convergence, but applying it to a specific vertical, and in this case it's real estate.”

Romaya adds that RealStir is redefining the category of real estate technology. “Zillow and Trulia use the advertising model. They use ad agents, but we use subscribing agents. We have a full social search engine built in that allows professionals to post relevant local market information on an area and communicate with prospects in real time. With Zillow, it's just listings and you have to look through them to find the agent.”

Romaya says with Zillow, users also have to go through a privacy wall, which isn't necessary with RealStir. “You can chat with agents directly in real time without any of that.”

The RealStir app is launching at the end of March for the residential side and will be available in Apple's app store in consumer and agent versions. Agents must be licensed in order to get the latter version, which will be released as OnePost.

“We're excited to launch in the residential marketplace, but we will open up to the commercial side—homebuilders, commercial developers and multifamily communities—this summer in Southern California on a test-case basis.”