Flika customers swipe proper on properties they like, and left on these they don’t. The app stands out for its consumer-heavy really feel and expertise, prefer it could possibly be as simply serving to an individual discover a new pair of sneakers.
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Flika is an AI-based cell app for shopper dwelling search.
Platforms: iOS; Android
Ideally suited for: Shoppers and brokers
High 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
High concern(s):
Competitors and market consciousness.
What it’s best to know
Flika is one other consumer-first startup that’s powering into the bogus intelligence-based dwelling search class. Its customers swipe proper on properties 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 wide selection of deal situations. Flika is voice-capable, as effectively.
Brokers may be listed on Flika in response to market efficiency utilizing MLS statistics, so it’s not based mostly on a advertising funds. Consumers 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 latest trade necessities.
The app stands out for its consumer-heavy really feel and expertise — prefer it could possibly 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 tips on how to converse.
The profile icon is simple with title and password entry, and so on., but it surely’s additionally the place Flika positioned its mortgage partnership pitch, which asks for a separate login. This may annoy me a terrific deal if I used to be a reside consumer of the app. I hate having to re-register as soon as already a part of a neighborhood, so I hope the Flika staff finds a approach to share login credentials with the mortgage accomplice. It’s additionally too upfront and salesy; it’s not built-in with the app and feels so much 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 attainable 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 anxious about being second fiddle, concern not. Flika makes it very clear who listed the house. It consists of their brokerage, the MLS# and the agent’s quantity, all beneath the map view and a few primary dwelling information.
Tapping the center app on the best nook of a picture signifies to the AI what you want inside every dwelling, and the X icon does the other. That is what actually drills down into what’s driving a shopper’s alternative. They could 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 now not have to spend six months overseeing. It releases them from the tedium of making an attempt 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 shall be saying extra options quickly to handle in-app provide submission and doc automation. Now, what issues me a bit right here is that such options may lead Flika to turning 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 great 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 client in thoughts, particularly vital 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 an alternative providing one thing for the one that needs to seek for what they need in a house, as an alternative of in response to what an MLS’s stodgy parameters tells them is obtainable. It’s a distinction in mentality; it’s the distinction between agent-first and consumer-first.
And it’s the explanation the trade is dealing with what it’s dealing with.
Have a expertise product you want to talk about? Electronic 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 choices. He now helps brokers with expertise choices and advertising by means of reviewing software program and tech for Inman.
