Buying a home in a real estate market that moves as quickly as it does today is stressful. Doing so from afar can be traumatic.
Chicago-based ReaLync is trying to make long-distance home-buying a little less daunting with an app it expects to launch in June.
Through the app, the company aims to let real estate agents give their clients live virtual property tours when their clients can’t do so in person.
“We are looking to provide a means for people to truly experience a property, and focus in on seeing what they want to see — without having to physically travel there to do so,” said Matt Weirich, the company’s 25-year-old co-founder and CEO.
Weirich said he came up with the concept during his own long-distance home search in 2011, when he was moving from Purdue University in Indiana to Chicago.
“I ended up driving six weekends in a row to look at real estate,” he said. “A light bulb went off. I realized I could have used a live video platform to tour properties and weed out the ones I would have been interested in, and saved myself a lot of trips back and forth.”
The company says the app will allow more than one person to log on at a time, even if they’re in separate offices or even in different countries. It will let users communicate via live video, take and save photos, zoom in and out, view property information and more. A cloud-based platform will allow users to save the tour files, which they will be able to review and share.
Buyers will be able to download the app for free but will be able to use it only if their agent paid for it.
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After a free first month, the company said, agents can sign up for one of three pricing tiers, beginning with 400 touring minutes and an open-house video feature for $40 per month.
“If you look at the real estate platform, you have still photos and pieced-together virtual tours, but your only other option is to physically go there,” Weirich said. “We are bridging the gap.”
Some might argue that the gap already had been bridged — for free.
“There are currently a number of similar applications such as FaceTime and Skype,” said Greg Jaroszewski, a real estate broker with Gagliardo Realty in River Forest. “I believe all of these are free and would accomplish a similar goal.”
The real estate space also includes an app called Blazing Tours, which allows agents to record, edit and upload video tours to social media sites.
Yet Weirich said ReaLync goes beyond other apps because of, among other things, its saving, sharing and live simultaneous-viewing features and follow-up capabilities.
After he came up with the idea, Weirich — who earned a degree in industrial management at Purdue — wasn’t sure how to set up the video platform. He started doing management consulting, specializing in strategic sourcing and procurement and cost reduction at Accenture.
There he met Ani Rangarajan, a Northwestern University graduate with a degree in industrial engineering who also was doing management consulting.
Rangarajan and Weirich worked at Accenture for three years and researched their ReaLync concept. They founded the company in November 2012 and took on Jeff Wolcott as chief technology officer last spring. Wolcott had worked as mobile development lead at GE Capital.
The company said it raised $40,000 via friends, family and their own money and recently secured $50,000 from a private investor in Indiana. The founders said they hope to secure another $200,000 and that they’re targeting individual angel investors.
They said they don’t plan to stop with their video app.
“We have a longer-term vision,” Rangarajan said. “It’s going to be something where the product will evolve and the applications in which we use it will evolve.”