Flika customers swipe proper on houses they like, and left on these they don’t. The app stands out for its consumer-heavy really feel and expertise, prefer it may very well be as simply serving to an individual discover a new pair of sneakers.
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Flika is an AI-based cellular app for shopper dwelling search.
Platforms: iOS; Android
Supreme for: Customers and brokers
Prime promoting factors:
• Easy, swipe-based search expertise
• Fast studying of preferences
• In-app chat dialog
• Two-way agent/two-party collaboration
• Auto-generated tour and purchaser company settlement
Prime concern(s):
Competitors and market consciousness.
What you need to know
Flika is one other consumer-first startup that’s powering into the synthetic intelligence-based dwelling search class. Its customers swipe proper on houses they like, and left on these they don’t. As a house is saved, the app learns what the consumer prefers, and from there the method turns into extra granular. Properties are scored and there’s a chat interface for partaking with the app in a big selection of deal eventualities. Flika is voice-capable, as properly.
Brokers may be listed on Flika based on market efficiency utilizing MLS statistics, so it’s not primarily based on a advertising and marketing funds. Patrons can discover or enter an related agent and are additionally offered a DocuSign-derived purchaser company settlement to have on the prepared, a pointy value-add stemming from current business necessities.
The app stands out for its consumer-heavy really feel and expertise — prefer it may very well be as simply serving to an individual discover a new pair of sneakers. The footer menu affords instruments for initiating search, discovering an agent, reviewing a house wishlist and the AI interface, which incorporates some samples on the best way to converse.
The profile icon is simple with title and password entry, and so forth., however it’s additionally the place Flika positioned its mortgage partnership pitch, which asks for a separate login. This may annoy me an ideal deal if I used to be a stay consumer of the app. I hate having to re-register as soon as already a part of a group, so I hope the Flika staff finds a technique to share login credentials with the mortgage associate. It’s additionally too upfront and salesy; it’s not built-in with the app and feels lots like an interruption to the search expertise.
The profile part can be the place customers can create teams for collaborative dwelling searches and conversations round potential listings. Good.
Mortgage pitch apart, the search expertise is what issues, and that’s what I believe customers will adhere to. For these itemizing brokers apprehensive about being second fiddle, concern not. Flika makes it very clear who listed the house. It contains their brokerage, the MLS# and the agent’s quantity, all under the map view and a few primary dwelling information.
Tapping the center app on the suitable nook of a picture signifies to the AI what you want inside every dwelling, and the X icon does the alternative. That is what actually drills down into what’s driving a shopper’s selection. They might love the kitchen and deck, however the nice room, main bed room and small storage are turn-offs.
It’s this app-based, AI-supported granular data that may make dwelling search one thing brokers not must spend six months overseeing. It releases them from the tedium of attempting to extrapolate from reticent consumers why one home is nice and the opposite offensive solely to see the preferences swap two excursions later. Let expertise deal with it, your worth rests in transaction steerage.
The app can be asserting extra options quickly to handle in-app supply submission and doc automation. Now, what considerations me a little bit right here is that such options could lead on Flika to changing into extra of a full-service transaction expertise, thus diluting the search expertise, relegating it to merely a pleasant part of a wider actual property enterprise utility.
The fantastic thing about this rising software program class, into which I’ll lump Eden, ListAssist and to some extent Mosaik (an app that has a transaction part, too) is that their collective expertise begins with the customer in thoughts, particularly important in a market that’s solely speaking about consumers.
Flika, like its brethren, may be extra nimble and impressed, much less entrenched to find methods to get brokers paid and as a substitute providing one thing for the one that desires to seek for what they need in a house, as a substitute of based on what an MLS’s stodgy parameters tells them is on the market. It’s a distinction in mentality; it’s the distinction between agent-first and consumer-first.
And it’s the explanation the business is dealing with what it’s dealing with.
Have a expertise product you want to focus on? E mail Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe began in business actual property on the daybreak of the dot-com growth, serving to an array of economic actual property corporations fortify their on-line presence and analyze inside software program selections. He now helps brokers with expertise selections and advertising and marketing by means of reviewing software program and tech for Inman.
