Atllas' Model Undercuts Its Best Asset — Its Software: Tech Review - Inman
Atllas' Model Undercuts Its Best Asset — Its Software: Tech Review - Inman
Atllas is a real estate brokerage that runs its business through a series of proprietary software products blanketing open house marketing, mobile web marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and a DIY digital marketing center.
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Atllas is a software-driven, 100% commission real estate brokerage.
Platforms: Browser; iOS Ideal for: Agents seeking alternative models and a tech-heavy model
Top selling points:
While these models can operate successfully with fewer agents, those agents do lack brand recognition when competing with legacy brands in traditional markets. Also, Atllas sells its software to outside agents, thus negating the competitive advantage to agents under its banner.
What you should know
Atllas is a real estate brokerage that runs its business through a series of proprietary software products blanketing open house marketing, mobile web marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) and a DIY digital marketing center, best compared to a Canva experience.
Agents pay a tiered flat fee for access to the tools and support in exchange for keeping 100 percent of their commission. It was founded by real estate broker Neema Bardi and operates in California at the moment, with additional states slated to come online later in 2024.
Important to note is that agents can subscribe to Atllas software without being a part of the brokerage, which raises a number of points. For starters, it’s going to force Bardi and his team to compete with some really well-established and, frankly, more sophisticated systems.
Granted, he hasn’t been in the game long enough to know fully what else is out there, but he’s likely to learn just how difficult it is to keep agents focused on a singular product. When the results don’t come, software is often the first to be blamed, and there’s not a proptech entrepreneur in the solar system who will disagree with that.
This isn’t a comment on the quality of Atllas’s stack, because it has some sharp features, but it absolutely does call into question the veracity of any argument Bardi tries to make for his software being a competitive advantage to his agents. If anyone can buy it, the advantage shrinks.
Loop is the company’s web-marketing experience, a lightweight mobile application that accumulates an agent’s social accounts and MLS-published listings into a single presence. I actually like it the more I think about it because I can’t tell you how universally awful it is to track down accurate contact information or even know who is listing what when using an agent or brokerage website.
A large part of why Zillow plowed through the industry so easily is because of the collectively meager investment individuals and offices put into their websites. Old team pages. Years-old brokerage affiliations. Thin, emotionally shallow bios. Bad pictures. Incredibly bloated domain names, like “johnsmithsupermegateam-excelrealestate.com” or whatever.
Sorry.
Anyway, something like Loop is really all you need, assuming you maintain it and share it as it should be shared. It includes links to your current social accounts and an MLS connection to relevant listings, coupled with registration links to upcoming open houses and a prominent contact call-to-action. It’s similar to the many Instagram plugins that allow users to publish a series of links and content on the backend of their profile.
The CRM, slim and straightforward, rests on the idea that all you really need is a name and email address. The CRM provides an AI, template-powered email compose function, which can be initiated by choosing the recipient or group, selecting a template and letting the AI do its thing. Messages can be edited manually, too.
Open Home is the company’s open-house marketing solution. There isn’t anything here you haven’t seen before, a surprise to me given Bardi’s claim to its uniqueness. But I get it: people love to brag on their children. There are QR codes and a log-in form. Still, its vertical integration with the overall system does allow for faster follow-up, given there are no third-party snags or clunky data imports needed.
Companies like Atllas are growing and posing complications for folks who write about the real estate industry. In short, this is a hard-to-define model, hovering above and between the lines of “brokerage-as-a-service” and models like Side and Place.
We don’t really know how to define a real estate company so heavily entrenched in technology but ultimately generating the majority of its revenue from home sales. I touched on this emerging brokerage model a few weeks back, here, in which I highlighted Perisphere, a company not shy about saying “the old way” is dying, even telling consumers on its website “Stop Paying $10,000+ To Sell Your Home!”
I wrote the following in my review of Efizbo:
You’re not going to like reading this, but with every new technology solution I see in this milieu, I become more convinced that consumers will have a reputable, dependable agentless option for buying and selling before 2025.
With Atllas, we’re one company closer.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
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