zavvie fits with a variety of enterprise level brokerages and can solves different business needs.
How zavvie Gives 8z an Edge Over Competitors
Introduction
The brokers at 8z Real Estate in Louisville, Colorado, want to provide their agents with as many opportunities as possible to land a client. So three years ago, when they noticed that billions of dollars were being invested into disruptive real estate technologies—iBuyers, Power Buyers, and other alternative models of buying and selling homes—they wanted to ensure that their agents would be included in those types of transactions.
“In traditional real estate, you’re talking about how you’re better than the other agent who comes in the door,” explains Doug Gieck, 8z’s VP of Production. To give 8z’s agents more of an edge, Gieck and the rest of the team knew they’d have to take steps to “protect our agents from being disrupted and keep them in the transaction regardless of what path consumers go down.”
For 8z, this meant collaborating with a partner that could provide some of those additional options to both buyers and sellers.
A clear conflict of interest
The brokerage had previously tried partnering with a Power Buyer, a sales solution that allows homeowners to leverage the equity and buying power in their current home to find a new house with a guaranteed sales price, which solves an aspiring seller’s “where am I going to go?” challenge as well as freeing up new inventory for buyers in the market. It was a good solution for clients, but there was tension around lender referrals: 8z has its own mortgage company, but its Power Buyer partner wanted the mortgage leads, an obvious conflict of interest.
“While we knew the product was amazing, the operations were not where they needed to be for us to be successful, and we knew there would be a better way,” Gieck notes. So they went looking for a solution that would allow them to provide buyers and sellers with innovative market-leading products and services—and no inherent conflict of interest.
That’s what 8z has found with zavvie, a white-labeled buying-and-selling solution that allows brokerages to provide iBuyer, Power Buyer, cash offer, and other services that buyers and sellers are increasingly coming to expect.
Opening doors to a wider audience
By partnering with zavvie, 8z is able to reach more potential buyers and sellers than they could otherwise, Gieck says. He notes that there are a number of different types of buyers and sellers who might want to buy (or sell) a house, but who are constrained by lack of knowledge or a deficit of options, and that zavvie has helped 8z find and work with more of those clients.
“In being able to offer these unique solutions, we’re gaining market share that we wouldn’t otherwise have gained because we couldn’t offer these products to that profile of client,” he explains. Equity-rich homeowners who don’t have a lot of cash on hand can use a Power Buyer solution to leverage their equity for a down payment on a new house. Homebuyers can opt for a cash offer solution, which can help them get a better deal on the house they want—without having to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquid cash on their own. And homeowners facing sudden life events, who want control over the timeline of their sale and move, can get immediate quotes from iBuyers.
“It allows us to be better than our competition,” Gieck argues, because we can come to a listing consultation with cash offers in hand. The rest of the real estate community is coming with a CMA and a presentation about how cool they are, and we show up with ‘This is how much you can make on your house right now.’"