How to sell your home and avoid your real estate agent

WANT to avoid your real estate agent? There’s an app for that.

FORGET the hassle of making yourself scarce from, or dashing to endless open houses.

When you’re buying or selling a home, that inconvenience is just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s also the nightmare merry-go-round of paperwork, phone calls, emails and need for updates with real estate agents.

That’s not surprising given there are about 200 tedious steps towards buying between appraisal and settlement.

That’s a lot of missed calls and email tag. But now, a new technology-based platform will ease the path between agents and customers.

Yep, finally, there’s an app for that. Which should make it uber-easy to deal with the paperwork.

Or an agency, to be precise, with a new real estate technology-based platform set to take the tedium out of home buying, offering direct contact and transparency between agents and customers along the 200-step path to buying a house.

LJ Hooker Avnu, run by former Google, Twitter, Qantas and LinkedIn execs, aims to reshape the homebuyer experience by smoothing the process, Fairfax reports.

It’s a separate entity to the LJ Hooker franchise model, and will have its own agents and shop front. The first agents and office is already set up in Sydney’s Neutral Bay, but if its cloud-based technology approach is working right, you’ll barely need to see them.

Instead, business will be mainly done with buyers while sellers can deal with the agents through the app and integrated platform which allows anything from real-time updates of how many viewings have been conducted, to helping select the pictures used for marketing.

LJ Hooker Avnu CEO Jason Chuck is the founder and former managing director of eHarmony and Houzz, and before that was head of marketing for Google.

He calls Avnu “real time real estate”.

“There are about 200 steps between listing to settlement that an agent, vendor and buyer need to navigate, but the LJ Hooker Avnu platform will make this process simple and transparent,” Mr Chuck told realestatebusiness.com.au

“The platforms we’re developing for our agents and our clients will facilitate unprecedented efficiency and transparency.

“By arming our clients and agents with the tools and data they need, we can give them comfort, information and control in the moments they need it most — whether that’s early auction day or 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Originally published as How to sell your home and avoid your real estate agent