David Stewart is my guest in this episode. He’s the founder of Market Buy - one of the new platforms that is working to make the sales communication process more efficient and transparent.

Dave is well known in the industry. He’s still a working agent, so he has excellent insights into what does and doesn’t work for agents. And Market Buy is having some significant success helping agents deliver a better service to both buyers and sellers, by making it easy to understand what price the offers are at so that buyers don’t leave anything in the tank. At the same time, as Dave explains, Market Buy has some great transparency filters that agents can adjust to suit the circumstances of the sale.

Market Buy has won several REIV Innovator of the Year awards and is now heading off to launch in the US. In fact, as this episode goes to air, Dave is heading to the INMAN Conference in New York. I have serious FOMO!

01:25 Dave gives us the Market Buy elevator pitch and the trends that led to Market Buy coming into being. 

03:26 Dave tells us the story of how he came to realise the power of transparency in getting the best price for a seller. 

04:13 Why you should never eBay property. 

06:11 Dave explains what the experience using Market Buy is like for a buyer. 

06:58 Market Buy from the agents perspective and the importance of simplicity for users. This section covers the uploading of contracts, and how agents can work the settings so they’re comfortable with transparency levels. 

09:27 Dave explains the transparency levels and the difference between price transparency and terms and conditions transparency for a sale. 

10:17 How consumers are leading the change towards more transparent transactions. 

12:07 David talks about uptake for Market Buy and the size of the market for the technology. 

14:35 Competition to Market Buy and the growing space of negotiation software.

16:21 Success stories from Market Buy

18:44 The role of Market Buy in building agent credibility.

20:05 The difference between removing the agent as a bottleneck and removing the agent from the transaction. The importance of enabling agents to be more efficient.

23:59 The role of Market Buy in achieving higher prices and better sale conditions.

26:59 The future for Market Buy.

29:14 Platform exhaustion and why it’s a real thing. What proptechs need to learn from it.

31:29 How David sees the role of agents changing over the next three to five years.

34:01 A bit of a postscript. Dave and I were supposed to finished up the interview, but we started talking about INMAN and the difference between pitching to Aussie agents and American realtors.