When the 2017 Inman Innovator Awards were announced, Buyside was among them.
That was not surprising. The company has solved a major problem in the real estate industry. In a two-sided market, only one side was visible: the sellers.
“Buying and selling is more efficient when you know what the market is for a home,” said CEO and founder Charles Williams. “You have a lot of information when you know how many buyers are – and what they are looking for. It was important to us, really.”
Williams, an engineer by training and third-generation real estate expert, started the Buyside platform with a focus on insight into market demand – and has developed this platform into a powerful tool for generating seller lists that also creates transaction opportunities for mortgage buying firms.
“Today, we connect with nearly every major technology vendor from Zillow and Trulia to StreetEasy Data, and every major brokerage portal in every major market out there. We consume their buy signals as they search for real estate and share these insights with industry and consumers. We see all activity And we collect it from all these disparate sources so that we can clarify the demand for any major metro across the country.”
The company has already explored several use cases for this data. Homeowners can see the buying side of their home – learn about the appraised value of their homes, and how many buyers are looking for a home just like them. This encourages a conversation between the homeowner and the agent, creating an average closed listing conversion rate of 11% in 2021. Agents can add this buyer’s interest to their listing offering, cementing their position as an expert in the local market.
Today, the company manipulates billions of data points around buyer intent — yes, billions. They are ready to expand beyond real estate with new and exciting applications for their service. But there was one issue.
“The name of the company was very limited,” Williams admitted. “We are moving into other sectors, including mortgage, home supply, insurance, communications and more. The name ‘Buyside’ doesn’t serve us anymore.”
So the team set out to find a new name. Someone who spoke about their mission and power using AI, which was flexible enough to work across sectors, but also had a connection to the original brand.
This name is Percy.
Percy is the first name of one of the original investors in Poisside—a relative of the family, in fact. But the name has also been given to the powerful machine learning algorithm the company is working on. And not just for internal use.
“Customers might ask about AI by name: Can Percy do that? Can Percy help us with that? The name was already part of our culture. Not to mention it had a professorial vibe, because the original Percy was an academic. It resonated with our employees and customers. It’s The next generation for our brand.”
Now Percy is an all-white label platform that has added to existing real estate and mortgage technologies, enriching data and helping to make smarter business decisions.
Agents need transactions, but they cannot achieve those transactions without inventory. Lenders use Percy to help generate leads for agents they have relationships with, and this creates inventory. Then in turn, this creates borrowers for lenders.
“Percy is that coach sitting behind you, whether you’re a homeowner, selling agent or buyer’s agent. He gives you the insights you need based on the billions of signals we collect from all over the market that day… We’ve evolved from what we’ve been ideally positioned in the market for. today “.
