A buyer’s agent has just used her smartphone to open the electronic lockbox on a for-sale home when her client starts firing off questions:
Has this home had any price changes recently?
How many square feet does it have?
Is it in a flood zone?
What’s the nearest elementary school?
If that agent is a member of the National Association of Realtors, it is now easier to answer those questions in real time.
Two of NAR’s wholly-owned, for-profit subsidiaries — Realtors Property Resource and SentriLock — have integrated their mobile app tools, allowing users of SentriLock’s SentriSmart app to tap over to RPR’s mobile app and immediately serve up details about the property the agent has just accessed.
“This integration will allow Realtors to present their clients with on-the-spot RPR data and reports about specific properties and neighborhoods,” NAR President Tom Salomone said in a statement, adding that the new integration will make Realtors “the fastest source for property information.”
Screen shots of RPR-SentriLock integration provided by RPR
“This [integration] makes the getting to the property facts extremely efficient for the Realtor,” RPR spokesman Reggie Nicolay told Inman via email.
“Additionally, there is the added benefit of credibility, as the Realtor can impress clients with immediate access to decision-prompting data and reporting by way of RPR app.”
What’s in it for Realtors?
RPR’s mobile app offers all 1.2 million Realtors on-the-go access to its parcel-based database of 166 million properties at no additional cost, including mortgage information, tax records and home valuations.
The app also offers school attendance zones, flood maps, demographic information and other data.
Through the app, Realtors can search public records, and if their MLS has partnered with RPR, their own MLS data as well. The vast majority of MLSs — 658 — have licensed their data to RPR. Members can also create customizable reports for any property right from their smartphone for their clients.
Both RPR and SentriLock “understand the speed and efficiency that agents and brokers expect in today’s business environment,” RPR CEO Dale Ross said in a statement.
“By making property information easier for agents to access and deliver to their clients and customers, consumers will receive tremendous benefit in the form of real-time, high-value property information.”
Like RPR itself, the RPR mobile app is unavailable to consumers and non-Realtor real estate professionals, making the RPR-SentriLock integration “a unique advantage for members of NAR,” according to the trade group.
One-way only integration
NAR has owned part of West Chester, Ohio-based SentriLock since its creation in 2003 and became its sole owner in 2011. SentriLock is the trade group’s official lockbox provider and has nearly 1 million lockboxes in use by over 280,000 agents from over 300 different boards, associations and MLSs in the United States and Canada, according to NAR.
This is a one-way integration — SentriLock is not directly accessible from RPR Mobile, according RPR’s website. This means that RPR is accessible only by SentriLock users who also have an RPR account and have downloaded RPR’s mobile app.
To turn on the integration, SentriSmart users must go to the Settings tab within the app, make sure the “Enable Listing Detail Integration” toggle is enabled (it should be green), select RPR and then choose a listing from the app’s Properties list they would like to use the RPR function with.
From then on, the user will be prompted to “View Property Details” when opening a SentriLock box.
“We feel this tool will give Realtors the advanced technology and data that they need during property showings, all at their fingertips,” said Scott Richardson, SentriLock chief operating officer, in a statement.
The state of RPR: users, revenue and projections
RPR has previously integrated with another Realtor-owned company, zipLogix, and with DocuSign.
RPR has struggled to make money in the seven years since its launch in 2009. By the end of 2016, NAR will have spent $144.7 million on the company, according to figures from NAR Finance Committee reports.
That amount that is projected to rise to $167.7 million by the end of 2017, $191.2 million by the end of 2018, and $215.2 million by the end of 2019.
That works out to about $24 per year per member — a figure NAR CEO Dale Stinton has said is a “bargain” for the “direct tangible benefit” provided.
There is a base of over 100,000 power users who use RPR more than once a month and 585,000 Realtors use RPR over the course of the year, NAR told Inman in June.
There are over 220,000 users on RPR Mobile, and annual report creation approaches 3 million reports, the trade group added at the time.
An Inman survey fielded in late February found that RPR was among the top 10 services provided by Realtor associations that respondents said they most used or benefited from. More than 4 in 10 respondents — 43 percent — said they used RPR.
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