March 30, 2012
By Tara Steele
AGBeat
Read this article on AGBeat
Online real estate auction sites are costly and lack security - RealBay is about to launch in private beta to disrupt the space and challenge the entire sector.
After completing nearly 300 online real estate purchases through eBay, Bay Area bulk REO specialist Stephan Piscano became frustrated with the online auction process like many others buying online. Through his first hand experience online, Piscano saw the holes in the system and sought out to build a solution that not only disrupted the online auction sector, but improves the very practice.
With only a splash page, a few thousand people have already signed up for Piscano’s RealBay.com which is now ListedBy.com which is on the verge of launching in private beta before being made public, and at launch, RealBay has 2,800 assets on the site. Piscano tells AGBeat that they will be partnering with Trulia.com to send out an email blast to their users which should boost RealBay traffic at launch, making it more valuable to participants.
RealBay is not only an online real estate marketplace, it is also an industry social network. The site has live bid auctions and fixed price property offerings and unlike competitors, RealBay is free to users, allowing real estate professionals to market themselves and their listings at no cost.
Piscano explained that RealBay’s competitors (Auction.com, Bid4Assets.com, RealtyBid.com, etc.) typically make it complicated (or impossible) for users to communicate as a means of maintaining control, as they charge a few hundred dollars as an insertion fee and a backend buyer’s premium of two to ten percent. RealBay wanted to open that up and allow parties to directly communicate, especially given the speed of the online buying process which can be slowed down by the traditional model of calling a buyer’s agent who waits for a listing agent’s return call.