ON CONSUMER DEMAND

Dan Mayes

Senior Vice President Management & Analytics, Offerpad

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
John F. Kennedy

Over the past decade, we’ve seen consumerization have an incredible impact on everything from devices to services. In that very short period of time, a seismic shift has occurred that put the consumer in the proverbial driver’s seat and customer experiences built to offer them the control, choice and customization they desired. However, the real estate industry had played it safe by comparison, offering transparency into home information or the ability to rate your agent online, but stopping short of real impact for people looking to buy or sell a home. Though our industry has traditionally been reluctant to make changes quickly, the rise of the on-demand home seller and buyer has given the opportunity for new companies to rise, meet and exceed the customer’s needs.

The transition from old to new ways of doing business is not unique to real estate. Like the change to how the financial services industry has evolved. While it happened far more slowly, and over the course of several decades, the main catalyst for change in financial services was consumer demand. Consumers wanted more control and convenience, they wanted to be able to access information in real-time. As technology improved, people were quick to not only adopt, but embrace new methods of doing business, like online banking, mobile banking and online trading. These solutions were faster and better than the status quo. It doesn’t get more personal than a person’s wallet; as people became comfortable with new tools and technologies, the industry had to shift to new ways of doing business.

What we see as a slow transition to new methods of serving our real estate customers is really quite fast, and I anticipate the pace will pick up. We know that consumers are increasingly mobile – they do everything on the go as they are always connected by the device in their hand, in their car, even the AI in their home. Their on-demand lifestyle has opened up incredible opportunities for us as real estate professionals to find new ways to meet their needs; to transact when they want to transact.

The industry is still highly fragmented. Many of the changes made since the availability of online home data have been incremental. They are variations on the same traditional buy and sell model, maybe a little faster or maybe a little cheaper. However, the iBuyer movement and availability of direct home purchase and sales is pushing the industry into a new direction and meeting the needs of this new on-demand customer. It is alleviating the pain points associated with buying and selling a home – inconvenience of time, lack of available funds – and putting the control in the consumer’s hands.

As an online service real estate company, Offerpad is expanding quickly – we’re currently in eight markets and growing.

SVP of Product Management and Analytics, Dan Mayes serves as senior vice president, product management and analytics at OfferPad. Dan has more than two decades of experience as a corporate leader and entrepreneur in the financial, technology and real estate fields. In 2009, he founded AZ Bidder, LLC, the first online auction platform of its kind, which acquired more than 30,000 homes under his leadership. Previously, Dan served as senior vice president for Priceline.com/Walker Digital LLC and senior vice president of business development for First Data Corp.