What if Zillow, Slack, and TurboTax had a baby?
In other words, what if a portal for buying & selling homes was combined with a really smooth system for collaborating among the parties involved in the transaction, and the guided consumer experience was truly as easy as doing your taxes online?
When we started Milestones in 2019, this was our objective. We wanted to create an experience that was outstanding for homebuyers, agents, lenders, etc. and felt truly modern – a marriage between tech and trusted relationships. In our minds, it was the natural evolution beyond real estate websites and email marketing.
Anyone who’d worked in real estate or mortgage long enough dreamed up something similar. If you attended a T3Sixty Summit or similar mastermind, you’d hear these concepts repeated. But execution takes years and is expensive, and most real estate companies aren’t particularly great at building and maintaining tech for the long haul.
Armed with a few million dollars of angel investment and our kid’s college fund, we proceeded ambitiously. We shipped home purchase and sale hubs about a year later and began evolving them based on feedback from early adopters.
Then on February 3, 2021, a Zoom call with York Baur, CEO of MoxiWorks, changed everything.
First, a bit of context. There are many options for real estate CRMs, websites, email marketing, and the like. Within enterprise brokerage, MoxiWorks is among the giants – approaching 400k agents. As York explained, Moxi’s approach is to help real estate professionals sell more real estate to their sphere – people they already know (vs. strangers from the internet).
From my time at Realtor.com, this made sense. Fierce competition, low conversion rate, and huge effort required to nurture online leads makes it challenging to achieve ROI for e-leads. There are about 110m homes, but only about 6m annual transactions. Among these transactions, only a small portion of consumers (less than 25%) actually meet their agent or loan officer online.
“You’ve developed amazing technology for guiding transactions”, said York. “But people only transact about once a decade. Why not adapt your platform for homeowners – this way, agents could stay connected and help them manage their largest asset.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. (So obvious that we missed it!)
And thus began Milestones’ pivot: a full-court press toward homeownership.
For most households, homeownership is a mess. My own family is a case study – when we bought a home in Austin, TX we were woefully unprepared to tackle finance, maintenance, repairs, improvements, and the many other moving parts.
By moving lock-step with homeowners – providing ongoing insights and helping them navigate the labyrinth of “gotchas” for a decade – real estate agents and lenders are in a much better position to win the next transaction (and keep their clients from becoming a lead for someone else).
With that clarity, our mission evolved to empower the real estate industry to serve homeowners – whether they’re buying, moving, owning, or selling.
We are proud to announce a strategic partnership with MoxiWorks, and are committed to helping real estate and mortgage professionals deliver ongoing value to homeowners – regardless of what CRM, website, or transaction management system they already use.
Recent Comments