What an Opendoor exec and a Realtor have in common

At Inman Connect San Francisco on Tuesday afternoon, Opendoor co-founder Ian Wong and Intero Real Estate Houston agent Jena Turner Casey sat down to chat about tech.

The unlikely pair shared their favorite tech tools for real estate with the audience and moderator Katie Kossev, an Intero Real Estate managing broker, at the panel “The Tech Tools Your Customers Are Dying to Know About” during ICSF’s Tech Connect track.

While many real estate agents worry about Opendoor, which buys and sells homes online, and its effect on their industry and livelihoods, Turner Casey wasn’t one of them.

“I see the benefit of Opendoor,” she said. “The seamless transaction is going to be appealing to a lot of buyers [but not to everyone].”

In their discussion of tech tools, Turner Casey pointed to a few specific apps and tools she started using with her team over the past year, while Wong hyped up Opendoor’s work on different stages of the real estate transaction.

According to Wong, the tech tools customers are dying to know about are “on-demand showings” and “seamless offers and closings” — both categories that are part of Opendoor’s pitch to consumers.

Wong talked about the categories generally and mentioned “others out there” working on the same pain points, but didn’t specify any other products by name.

Turner Casey named a few tech products that her team in Houston has used:

• Asana, a transaction and workflow management tool (also used by Inman’s marketing and product teams)
• MarCELL Pro, a device not reliant on electricity or Wi-Fi that sends property checks about an empty house’s temperature and water level
• Canary Camera, a security camera used to keep track of activity in a home, including open houses
• Over, an app for designing flyers and marketing materials
• Apple’s FaceTime video calling app, to update clients on listings while keeping calls shorter and forging a stronger connection

Both Turner Casey and Wong noted the benefits of virtual staging for visualizing what a home will look like.

Opendoor execs and real estate agents: not so different — except in their willingness to namecheck other companies.

Email Emma Hinchliffe