Service helps real estate agents get their weekends back
Real estate professionals often must reschedule their day because of last-minute property showings. For Nadia Davis’ father, a long-time real estate broker, one showing even delayed his family’s Thanksgiving dinner. When Brian Davis commented that he wished he could have just paid someone to do the showing, it got them thinking, why can’t this service exist? After more research, Nadia set out to create it.
“Our goal is to have this platform in the form of an app that connects real estate agents to licensed showing assistants in their areas,” Nadia Davis said.
Currently she is running the business in the tricounty area via the web. Real estate agents use the platform, myshowagent.com, to schedule showing assistants to show properties on their behalf to their clients. Once the app is developed, they will also be able to see all future, current and completed showings and receive notifications about how the showings are going. Users also will be able to communicate through the app with the Show Agent.
Show Agents was the FIU Track winner of the 2021 Miami Herald Pitch Competition.
For now, just Nadia and one other employee, both licensed real estate agents, handle the showings as they are continuing to test the service manually while working on the application. Her father acts as an advisor for the startup, which is also a licensed brokerage.
Nadia believes expanding the team of Show Agents will not be difficult because of the large pool of people who have active real estate licenses but aren’t using them. Another source of Show Agents could be agents new to real estate.
The Show Agents receive fees for performing the service — and no portion of any commission. “Our competitors use agents who are working with their own clients, and that presents opportunities for distrust and solicitation,” Nadia said.
Nadia is an alumnus of Florida International University who studied broadcast media and business management, and earned a certificate in entrepreneurship. She went on to earn an MBA at Nova Southeastern.
She quit her job at an investment company to work on Show Agents full time in August. For testing purposes, Show Agents prices are set quite low now — $25 to $35 depending on location — but will be increased and based more on the size of the home, she said. The idea was just to get agents to try the service and provide feedback.
And they have been. “I work with some top producing agents who see the value in using the service as a productivity tool to enable them to stay in the office and we are the people in the field working with their clients,” Nadia said.
The Show Agents team is now doing about 30 showings a month. They hope to scale up to about 300 by the time the app comes out early next year.
“Learning to market the service was one big learning curve,” Nadia said, adding that she is now selling the service to real estate teams rather than individual agents.
“We are learning what features are necessary to service our clients with a VIP experience,’’ she added. ‘‘I feel as though I have learned how the service will work because I have been actually in the field. It’s exciting to see how far we’ve come in the journey and see where we will go in the future.”
Ultimately Nadia hopes to expand Show Agents nationally. “No matter where you go. people are looking for somewhere to live.”