While innovating the default disposition industry over the last 11 years, we’ve always kept our eye on the next major tipping point: the seamless interaction between buyers and sellers. After more than a decade of hard work and dedication — which has resulted in a state-of-the-art infrastructure; proprietary analytics tools; historical transaction data; and deep, trusting partnerships — we are about to change the landscape again by revolutionizing the way buyers and sellers interact.
Over the last year, we’ve been rolling out a suite of tools called Auction Interact — our vision of the future for our buyers and sellers. Tool by tool, we are building a bridge to true transparency and arming buyers and sellers to conduct essential sales functions in real-time.
“The traditional method of disposition holds sellers captive to a series of non-transparent intermediaries who may not be aligned with the seller’s ultimate goal,” said Ali Haralson, Auction.com’s chief business development officer. “We are building a solution that gives control back to both our buyers and sellers and removes the friction that prevents real progress in this industry.”
Auction.com has achieved a level of technological advancement that offers transparency in real estate as never allowed before, empowering you with real-time decision-making, direct control, and the ability to manage your inventory to drive results. And the future is here.
The next great leap forward for Auction.com — and our industry — will be revealed with the launch of the next tool: Bid Interact. Today, our platform puts buyers and sellers closer together than ever before. But the Bid Interact tool will take it to a much higher level: direct negotiations between buyers and sellers in real time. No go-between. No delay. Just maximized results for both parties.
This evolution has begun, and Auction.com’s latest tools are leading the transformation in the disposition industry.
The game changer: Bid Interact
Auction.com recently capped off the Five Star Conference in Dallas with a massive on-site Live Bid Interact event. Sellers from around the country gathered in a control center where they monitored live bidding to make real-time decisions on their assets as the online bidding came to a close. The energy was palpable. The results were beyond excellent.
But this was only a snapshot of a transparent interaction strategy that’s over 11 years in the making.
That short, four-hour live event confirmed that our buyers and sellers could move $33 million in distressed assets by having direct control and the power of real-time decision making.
“What we saw in the Live Bid Interact event is the future of our industry,” said Haralson. “As sellers were participating in the bidding in real time, they could react without delay, which is a true draw for buyers and sellers to interact in a way that is unquestionably revolutionary. So imagine being able to do this from wherever you had Internet access. It’s a game changer.”
Informed decision-making: Portfolio Interact
The Portfolio Interact tool is a business intelligence dashboard for sellers, which delivers unprecedented, asset-level detail; portfolio reporting; and smart analytics for more informed pricing control and decision-making. No need for multiple spreadsheets — it conveniently puts actionable data at your fingertips with numerous filters that narrow the data set to identify trends and uncover opportunities.
Recently, we added enhanced foreclosure data to the Portfolio Interact tool, so now our sellers using this free tool can get easy-access reporting on all of their foreclosure, REO and CWCOT assets.
The Pricing Optimization features let you review priority assets and validate pricing using actionable intelligence. You can edit the REO reserve or CWCOT contribution and quickly pinpoint assets with reserve prices exceeding market value, bids within range of reserve, and a last chance to sell.
Live bid capture: AuctionSync
The AuctionSync platform has transformed live events by taking an offline foreclosure auction and digitizing the experience to deliver a fast, simple way to ingest, analyze and share never-before-captured bidding data.
Capturing this data electronically not only makes the registration process fast and easy for buyers, but it lets the Auction.com analytics team look at bidding behavior and bid increments to help sellers validate pricing assumptions. We can also collect feedback and use it along with market data to better target buyers for marketing efforts — a win-win for both sellers and buyers.
Collecting live event data was once elusive. Today its integral in the quest to bring buyers and sellers closer together.
Digitized status tracking: Foreclosure Interact
The Foreclosure Interact tool is a new feature of the Auction.com app for buyers. It gives buyers real-time auction status updates, regardless of where they are, to help them meet their investing needs. As long as buyers have their phone, they can always be in the know about the status of foreclosure auctions.
Today, the app offers the ability to:
- Receive real-time status updates — Buyers are informed when properties are cleared for sale or canceled in real time.
- Track properties from anywhere — Buyers know which properties are in-auction and actively accepting bids.
- Sort properties by venue — Buyers can filter all the properties up for auction at any specific venue.
By digitizing information, buyers can more easily monitor auction properties and receive time-saving updates. Auction.com has gone beyond the courthouse steps so bidders can access essential information on their mobile device. But this is just the beginning. We are committed to evolving the app to meet the needs of our buyer base.
Efficient and transparent interactions — where buyers and sellers can work with each other to sell properties — will lead to a more robust and valuable exchange of information and negotiation. And this leads to more sold properties at a higher execution rate. And what’s more, the future of the Auction Interact technology not only holds tremendous promise for both buyers and sellers — communities win too, as neighborhood stabilization becomes the building block of revitalization and helps turn more distressed properties into homes.
