House sale fintech has price guarantee

A real estate technology firm working with Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce is making a pandemic-driven pitch: sell your home without having to let prospective buyers roam your corridors by getting a guaranteed price that lets you shop for and move into a new house.

“The pandemic has made an already stressful home buying and selling process even more volatile,” said Anshul Ruparell, chief executive and co-founder of Properly, which is launching the product in Toronto and will also be rolling in out in Ottawa.

The tech firm compares itself to a traditional real estate agent, with the usual five per cent commission fee, but machine learning is used to determine the price a home is likely to fetch on the open market and the firm guarantees that backup offer if it doesn’t sell within 90 days.

Instead of going the traditional route of buying a new home and then selling the old one — hoping to get the expected amount, and having prospective buyers sometimes making multiple visits — the seller can use the guaranteed floor price to buy and move into a new home, and the old home can be listed once they’ve moved out.

This allows them to “substantially reduce risk” when managing what is often the biggest transaction of their lives, Ruparell said.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, residential real estate sales plummeted and prices fell, but both have begun to rebound. Toronto registered an increase in residential transactions of nearly 30 per cent in July compared to a year ago, due to pent-up demand, according to the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.

Tracy Best of CIBC, said Canada’s fifth-largest bank is dipping a toe into a partnership with Properly by providing advice the tech firm’s clients through referrals, similar to arrangements the bank has with agents and brokers in the real estate sector.