I’ve been interested in real estate since I bought my first house in college. So when Faira approached me to help them rethink real estate transactions it was a no-brainer for me. If you’ve ever bought or sold a home you know how complex it can be. Real estate is an industry ripe for disruption and tackling the actual transaction was where we started.
At Faira we rearranged the transaction to benefit the buy and the sell side. Our mission was fairness, thus the name, Faira (pronounced FAIR-ah). We built Faira’s business and product around four pillars: the linkage principle, incentive compatibility, social validation principle and the revelation principle.
Self-service selling
We introduced a self-service platform to get sellers marketing their own home. I simplified the entry needed to get a home live on the local MLS and by doing so reduced the amount of hours needed from a real estate agents. Our agents at Faira can easily serve triple the amount of customers a traditional agent can.
Role: Director of UX, Identity, Marketing design, UI, UX, copy-writing
Team: Katrina Wisner, Ricardo Prates de Oliveira, Kamal Jain
Instant,dynamic offers drive faster and firmer negotiation
The founders of Faira wanted to see an offer platform that was fair and gave feedback to all interested parties.
So we designed a unique real estate offer platform. Offers from buyers to sellers take place online on Faira. All offers are public so all other buyers can see their competition. It takes one minute for a buyer to enter an offer to a seller. It takes one minute for a seller to respond to the offer. If there are multiple buyers competing for a home the Faira platform fairly and privately handles the buyers’ escalations. Offers are also adjusted to the perspective of the person viewing the amount. For example, if buyer A is buying with the help of an agent, but buyer B is not, buyer B will see that their offer can be 3% higher than buyer A without increasing their bottomline cost.
Role: UX, UI, Director
Team: Ricardo Prates de Oliveira, Jooneil Ahn, Tristan Fernando
Buyers and their agents alike can make offers on the Faira platform. We made the process simple and transparent. By introducing a small credit card hold Faira was able to ensure to the seller that the buyer was genuine. This smaller fee replaced the use of the typical 2% earnest money deposit and drove our transaction success rate above the average success rates of the markets we were in.
Inspections and bookings
In most states the home inspection takes place after an offer has been accepted. The buyer assumes the inspection cost and if any problems are found the buyer renegotiates their offer price down. It hurts the seller and sews doubt with the buyer. By having a neutral third part perform the inspection before a listing goes live on Faira all buyers get to see the home’s inspection before making an offer. Per the linkage principle from auction theory, the more a buyer knows about the property (good or bad information) before making an offer, the better the buyer will make the offer. The result on Faira was an extremely low transaction failure rate and no renegotiation of price once under contract.