There have been an avalanche of articles and social media postings concerning the Zillow acquisition of Showing Time for a cool half-billion dollars, many of the articles drawing critical comments from upset real estate agents. One of the articles appearing in Inman pointed out that “Before the consumer even begins the transaction, there are two key parts to the “pre-transaction” phase of the real estate ecosystem, both search and showing. Zillow now owns both of those with the leading consumer search portal and now the acquisition of Showing Time. “
“If they added lockbox, that would be the end of that,” KW’s Gary Keller said. “That would be it. I could find a home, I could make an appointment, I could go see it, and I could get inside it.”
As soon as I read the Keller comment about adding the lockbox element, I texted my friend Jonathan Martis, CEO of Kleard with this midnight prediction: “Get ready, Jonathan, I believe your phone is going to start ringing off the wall with calls from acquisition suitors.”
Sure enough, in a matter of days, the Kleard executive team huddled and elected to seek an acquisition path. I reached out to Jonathan to find out more about his thinking on a possible acquisition of his Self Tour technology.
Jonathan said: “It's interesting timing because our executive team at Kleard have decided we are seeking an acquisition. We feel an acquisition will help Kleard's self tour technology grow much more quickly and benefit the real estate agent and consumer. Our technology is built for the future and we want agents to have this in their hands so that they're not being cut out. The timing for this is right, even Gary Keller believes this is a big deal as mentioned in the Inman article.
This is a big opportunity for the real estate industry to do something for its agents. What we've built with our self tour tech for properties for sale and rentals is the future. Our commitment while in the NAR REACH program was to help support agents and that's still our goal as we seek an acquisition. We want to support real estate agents with great technology.”
For more information on the self tour technology, check out www.kleard.com/now.html