When Charles Drouin looked at the mobile app landscape about five years ago, he noticed there was a problem when it came to the real estate industry: clients sometimes had more information than agents.
“We said, ‘You know what, we need to make an app for the agents,’” says Drouin, the president and CEO of Montreal-based Prospects Software. Consumers have access to a lot of information from apps like Realtor.ca and Zillow-Trulia in the U.S. Drouin says he thought, “Their goal is to serve the consumer. We need to make something that is not for consumers.”
Enter Prospects Mobile in Canada and MLS Touch in the U.S., which launched in Montreal and Los Angeles in 2011. (The company can’t use MLS in Canada, where the term is trademarked by CREA.)
“We serve the agents. That’s how we differentiate ourselves. Every feature we build is for an agent,” Drouin says of his 30-employee company, which launched in 1999 with customer relationship management (CRM) software. The app provides agents with access to all active, sold and expired listings, and all the search criteria, market stats and sales comps – everything the consumer doesn’t have.
Charles Drouin
He says the aim was to build a mobile app that would offer as much as possible to agents and be indispensable while they’re out showing properties to clients. Agents can search active, sold and expired listings and sold comparables, plan tours for buyers, get live market stats and more.
The Prospects Mobile app is now available to about 40,000 Realtors in Canada and is offered to them as a benefit by their boards. It’s being used throughout Quebec, Calgary, Fort McMurray, Winnipeg, Northern B.C., Okanagan Mainland and all boards that are with ListCentral, among other places.
In the U.S. it’s being used by about 100,000 agents, with clients such as Navica, an MLS provider with 160 boards and 40,000 members, and boards in California, Staten Island, N.Y, Vail, Colo., and Austin and San Antonio in Texas.
“We’re really a mobile MLS system,” says Drouin. “We can provide the same experience (agents) have on their computer on a mobile device.”
Boards that sign up with the company have their core MLS systems but those systems are not focused on mobile. “When we show it to boards, they’re really like, ‘This is what they need.’”
“They have all the search criteria that they have in the MLS system that you don’t find usually on consumer websites.” As well, the app is synced to the MLS system every 10 to 15 minutes.
He estimates about 70 per cent of users have the app on iPhone, 28 per cent on Android and two per cent on Blackberry. As of early September, the app had 219 reviews on the App Store, with 136 reviewers giving it five stars and 44 offering up four stars.
Drouin says there are two features that “are killing it” on the current version, Prospects Mobile 2.0.
One is called Instaview. When clients see a property for sale while they’re being shown listings and say, “Oh, what about that one? You didn’t send us that one,” the agent can just point the device at the listing, click on Instaview and obtain the listing info.
The other feature is comps or sales comps, which agents need when they go meet a client to list or are working with a buyer. From the settings, agents can define how the app will find comparables, whether that means going back six months or two years or finding properties priced within 20 per cent of the asking price. “You can define criteria and the app will find the comps you need and want.”
Also added recently was a hot sheet feature that gives agents all the new listings, price reductions and sales in the previous five days.
New features that are on the way will allow agents to plan showings on the phone and not just on a tablet, or to set up market reports and send them to clients with just one touch.
Drouin says competitors, who are mainly in the U.S., “are all going towards the consumer and we’re sticking to our plan to focus on the agents.”
He expects market share for the app to grow in Canada but says there will be more growth in numbers of users in the U.S., given the size of the market.
In November, the company plans to launch Prospects 3.0, with a new user interface and added features, including integration of its CRM software that still provides the company with a large chunk of its business.
“We get suggestions every day from members,” he says. “We’re building new features almost every week.”
Danny Kucharsky is a contributing writer for REM.
