Innovative agency making real estate waves

Innovative agency making real estate waves in their first year

After a planned quiet introduction into the industry, online real estate agents 200 Square Limited have just celebrated 9 months since their official market launch having sold over $13 million worth of property.

The company has aimed to simplify the process of selling a house by putting the power back into the hands of the buyer and seller rather than the real estate agent. In under a year quietly testing and tweaking the model for 200 Square, Grant Wakelin a veteran of both the Silicon Valley technology and NZ real estate industries believes they have finally perfected the recipe.

“200 Square makes it easy to get the best value out of your house by keeping most of the traditional fees in your wallet rather than an agent’s”, Wakelin explains. “We’ve built an agency from the ground up to leverage the latest technology and empower modern Kiwi sellers and buyers drastically improving the efficiency of agent work, all without impacting the value and quality of the service. This allows us to charge a fixed rate fee of just $2,000 per sale saving up to 90% over traditional agents.”

200 Square manages the entire sale process online via a customdeveloped application. The platform manages listings on TradeMe and Realestate.co.nz, allows communication between buyer, seller and agent, and feeds statistics and updates to the seller in real time. It also offers all the services of a traditional agent with sellers able to place advertising, order signage and manage open homes through an easy to follow online system.

Customers seem to be appreciating the innovative approach too with the company selling over $13 million worth of property and saving its customers more than $400,000 in commission fees so far.

“It was liberating. 200 Square is about the new way of doing things, we love it because it is so empowering” says Voon Yi after successfully selling his family home through 200 Square. “We sold within weeks, while we were 800km away, getting everything done over internet and phone”.

Tina Lum has sold two properties through 200 Square. “Although their approach to the real estate market was a new concept it worked well for us ... we have since used the 200 square team again and they successfully sold our second property which settled yesterday.”

Wakelin accepts that while the new approach might not be for everyone, he’s happy that he’s already made a difference for plenty of home sellers in just a short time. “Some people will want to remain completely handsoff,

and that’s fine. But we’ve seen that there are plenty who would love to be slightly more involved through the sales process, and we want to empower those sellers. It’s a great feeling hearing that we’ve made a big difference to many families in these tough economic times.”

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