It is a reality that has frustrated real estate incumbents for almost two decades now. Despite the fact that MLSs, REALTOR® associations and big brokerages have long controlled all the listing data and assets that consumers covet, relative outsiders (namely, big portal websites) nearly always get the first look from those looking to buy or sell.
How and why that happened is a longer story. But today, one company is hoping it can start to change this dynamic, and put the kind of service, convenience and technological capabilities that consumers have come to expect back into the hands of real estate professionals.
“We rolled out Nestfully a couple of years ago, and from the start, our vision was to create a collaboration tool that would simplify the home-buying process,” says Bright MLS Chief Marketing Officer Amit Kulkarni. “We’ve kind of been quiet since then and been hard at work, but philosophically, we knew what we wanted to do.”
A joint venture between the California Regional MLS (CRMLS) and Bright MLS, Nestfully is kicking off a new phase today with the launch of its mobile app for subscribers of nine large MLSs, and adding a whole new ecosystem including in-app permanent document sharing and lead-tracking insights.
The app will also automatically filter “no-no words” banned by the NAR settlement, according to Kulkarni, in order to facilitate compliance with new policies.
With so many deeply entrenched competitors, though, Nestfully has a significant challenge ahead to bring both consumers and agents to its platform, with other portals pushing aggressively to bring as many transactions into their own ecosystems as possible. Without the advantage of billions of dollars to spend on marketing, and shirking the hyper-monetization strategy used by many of the legacy portals, Nestfully is counting on its foundation—the agent-client relationship—to differentiate.
“Trust, that’s the core fundamental truth (of) the real estate relationship,” Kulkarni says. “People hate real estate agents…but they love their agent. What Nestfully is doing is giving that consumer the ability to take their agent that they love, and put it right there in the palm of their hand. That’s how the trust is built.”
But Kulkarni says he also understands that MLSs have fallen far behind legacy portals in just the basic usability and technology that helps consumers and agents navigate a home transaction. He emphasizes that Nestfully was built by “the best of the best” engineers and developers, including folks who worked on CoreLogic’s OneHome portal and others with backgrounds in high-intensity fields like weather mapping.
“Consumers are used to getting some of the best of the best technology…to use on their home search. Agents are at a huge deficit, brokers are at huge deficit because they don’t have the same benefit. Their technology is dated, they don’t have their best stuff,” says Kulkarni. “What we want to do is make sure that what we provide to the professional is at least as good, if not better than what the consumers are using on their end.”
What does that actually look like? RISMedia was offered a demo of the new features ahead of the app’s launch today:
Focused on a clean user interface and a simple, navigable structure, Nestfully on the surface certainly resembles the kind of technology used by the bigger portals. Offering features like free-drawing on maps to show listings only from very specific areas, in-depth filters for home characteristics and notifications for saved searches, there is nothing particularly novel about Nestfully’s offerings—all the large consumer portals offer similar tools for both agents and consumers.
But Kulkarni says that is kind of the point. As a former senior executive at a major portal himself, he says that Nestfully isn’t trying to offer a “net new” experience.
“A lot of times, MLSs and real estate people, they just try to reinvent the wheel,” he says. “We have brought people who have done these things before, (who) know best practices.”
Nestfully’s philosophy is more about elevating the admittedly creaky MLS tech foundation to align with consumer expectations, he says, and then bending those tools to better facilitate the agent-client relationship. That contrasts with the big legacy portals who largely are battling over monetizing a limited number of transactions, often touting metrics like web traffic, which Kulkarni says Nestfully is simply not interested in.
“Real estate, it’s not for funsies, right?” he says. “When you’re actually in the process of buying a home, it actually kind of stinks. It’s stressful, it’s arduous, it’s emotionally draining…when somebody is in-market and they’re really making decisions for themselves and their families, we want them to be able to make trusted, educated decisions with somebody they can really lean on and rely on. That’s what I care about.”
Diverging paths
In the wake of policy changes and general disruption of the real estate industry last year, legacy portals, iBuyers and proptech companies were not shy about saying that they saw the moment as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. Whether it was from the rule changes or just from a general atmosphere of distrust and negativity around the REALTOR®/MLS ecosystem, incumbents were put on the defensive in terms of both technology and services.
But much of that backlash also reached the legacy portals, focused on their low-quality leads, tendency to spam consumers with ads and attempts at integrating other aspects of the home transaction into the ecosystem.
Nestfully, according to Kulkarni, seeks to avoid both of these negatives. Touting its “fee-free ecosystem,” the idea is to translate the MLS system into an intuitive, familiar and aesthetically pleasing platform, Kulkarni says—which is what Bright’s research has found agents want most of all.
“Our No. 1 pain point with our subscriber base is, ‘We would like a mobile app provided by the MLS that we can use.’ That is it. I mean, it’s like the Michael Jordan of pain points. So I think we’re addressing that,” he says.
A four-month beta test involving 50 agents across the country helped really hone the specific features, according to Kulkarni, including features like anonymizing some data to prevent lead poaching and the most useful filters in home searches.
In the press release put out with the app’s launch, the company also doesn’t shy away from the fact that it is coming up in a new world for real estate, zeroing in on “agents and brokers who have been squeezed by pressures from both the economy and the NAR settlement in recent months.” In that release, Kulkarni also took a shot at the “your listing, your lead” model touted by the recently relaunched Homes.com, calling those things “commodities.”
In the demo, Nestfully Senior Product Manager Judy Darvin focused on features the company hopes are more about collaboration than commodity—following a buy-client’s activity, multiple avenues to communicate with leads or invite clients to the app, and moderation tools to prevent abusive (or settlement non-compliant) messaging.
Filtering out the settlement-violating communications that can get agents in “trouble”—with that feature vetted by legal counsel—is just another way to support agents, according to Kulkarni, though he declined to share exactly what words or terms were banned.
Also notable, much of Nestfully’s interface is meant to emulate what consumers are familiar with, as the in-app messaging closely resembles Apple’s iMessage. Kulkarni says again that many of these design choices are intentional, aiming to help consumers and agents adapt to the platform with as little pain as possible.
Nestfully also promises to add an “agent-assisted” automated valuation tool (AVM) that will differentiate from competitors like the “Zestimate” by providing transparency in how it calculates property values—something Bright MLS has previously teased and advocated for. Other upcoming features include augmented reality showing where parcel and property lines are, and custom notifications for new listings in a particular area or neighborhood for agents to use in farming.
“We wanted to make sure that we build technology that satisfies real world considerations,” Kulkarni says. “How can we use technology to make people’s lives easier? It’s not just technology for the sake of technology.”
Against the behemoths that currently dominate the space, Nestfully doesn’t have that marketing or brand recognition to go toe-to-toe with other players in the “portal wars,” even if it wanted to. What Kulkarni says Nestfully does have is the aforementioned “core fundamental truth” that consumers want a relationship built on trust with a real estate professional, and the hope that both agents and consumers will flock to a platform that facilitates those relationships.
“Homebuying and selling is stressful. It’s expensive, and we’re not trying to uber-monetize that,” Kulkarni says. “Let’s just help make it more efficient for the people that are already doing yeoman’s—and yeo-women’s—work in helping these people buy and sell homes. That’s what we want to go after.”
