How the new platform is changing the U.S. and international real estate market
Last Saturday, April 15 at 8 pm EST, an episode of Advancements, aired on Bloomberg TV, devoted an ample segment to the U.S. housing market and talked about NEO, New Estate Only at length.
The program, hosted by Ted Danson, deals with specific sectors and fields of industry and business, highlighting their state-of-the-art and potential future developments, with an educational and outreach approach that is well-received by a wide audience throughout the United States. On this occasion, the topic in the spotlight was the particular situation of the housing market.
The major critical issues in the housing market
Buying and selling homes in the United States has become increasingly difficult in recent years, particularly for those doing so from abroad or remotely. The rapid evolution of sales and marketing methodologies as well as the expansion of digitization have challenged all the major players in the real estate market i.e., real estate agents, developers, and buyers of new homes.
When interviewed by Advancements, Paulo Bethencourt, VP of Marketing & International Sales at Lennar, identified three challenges faced on a daily basis by the major home builders in the U.S.: customer awareness of real estate offerings, building trust with potential buyers, and understanding buyers on a linguistic level, overcoming language barriers, as well as their expectations. In all cases, these challenges become more prohibitive when clients are foreigners or seeking homes from abroad (find out how and where international buyers buy homes in the United States).
Paulo Bethencourt also emphasized that developers must maintain control over the way real estate projects are presented and marketed by agents, especially by those abroad. Besides details that risk getting lost in translation, all information about properties for sale must be kept up-to-date and always available, so as not to damage the brand integrity.
Information on existing real estate projects and those under construction
In this regard, Teresa Kinney, CEO of the Miami Association of Realtors, emphasized how valuable it is for top real estate agents to have accurate information about projects, properties, and new construction on the market. She pointed out that until recently, this has been seen as a big gap for real estate professionals.
Not to mention that home plans existed only on paper. For properties under construction, much of the information was not available until the project was complete, forcing real estate agents and buyers to rely only on renderings and their imagination to get an idea of what the finished product will look like.
Technology, however, is changing the way real estate professionals can receive and use project information. According to Cliff Long, CEO of the Orlando Regional Association of Realtors, modern technologies have helped create a bridge, a direct link with buyers even at a distance, allowing Orlando real estate agents to talk to potential clients in South America as if they were in the same room. This is a point of no return, also in real estate.
NEO, the platform for real estate professionals
“To best promote pre- and under-construction real estate, there was the need of something different that the usual listings we were used to”, Thomas Calusa, COO of NEO, told Advancements microphones. The innovation is NEO – New Estate Only, a platform designed to meet the greater needs of the real estate market players.
NEO puts buyers at the center of each real estate project, making it 360-degree navigable to experience firsthand the lifestyle of a new home, and in parallel gives developers the autonomy to upload their best projects to the platform and keep them constantly updated in a quick and user-friendly manner.
As Daniel Guerra (Fortune International Group) pointed out, each developer can provide pre-construction, in-construction, and post-construction information, prices, and warranties in one place, maintaining control over this data at all times.
The NEO platform creates new meeting spaces for agents, buyers and developers and new opportunities to connect with the national and international real estate market. Reaching foreign real estate agents and potential buyers worldwide through them has always been complicated for home builders: “We needed a two-way web tool that allows agents to properly represent our products and us to constantly control the information,” said Paulo Bethencourt. Today, that tool is NEO, allowing developers to effectively provide real estate agents with the correct information to present their projects worldwide, while maintaining a tight control over the information that reaches end customers.
The future of the housing market and the potential of NEO
Christian Calusa, CEO of NEO – New Estate Only, predicts that technology will influence the real estate industry even more in the near future, with buyers seeking more and more detailed, interactive, and clear information about projects in less and less time. As always, the market will reward the people who can be at the forefront of meeting these demands. NEO is laying the groundwork to become the benchmark for home sellers and home seekers in the United States and worldwide.
