invisionAZ: Offerpad

Buying or selling a home is an extremely complex task, but two Arizona-based real estate experts have created a platform that streamlines the process like never before.

Jerry Coleman and Brian Bair each worked on various real estate enterprises over the years, and in 2009 they teamed up to combine their expertise on home-buying to develop a better experience for consumers. In 2015, the pair co-founded Offerpad, an online, on-demand real estate platform that takes the user through the entire buying or selling experience from beginning to end.

“Brian and I have been in real estate for over 20 years,” Coleman said. “We’ve seen over that time all of the challenges with selling a house and buying a house, and so as we’ve operated within the space we’ve always said, ‘there’s a better way to do this.’ So, we created Offerpad as a way to make the process much easier on a homeowner.”

The traditional process of selling a house can take about three to five months, entails contacting a number of different parties and is encompassed by uncertainty and risk, Coleman said.

“The process that Offerpad has created to sell a house entails coming onto our website, taking five minutes to enter information about your house,” he said. “We’ll get you an offer in 24 hours. You can accept that offer, and you pick your close date, and you’re done.”

Offerpad has been growing rapidly, increasing its personnel by nearly 300 percent between mid-2017 and fall of 2018. The company has expanded to Dallas-Fort Worth and will soon be moving out of its crowded Gilbert headquarters into a much larger office space in Chandler.

By the end of 2018, Offerpad was available in approximately 534 cities, with plans to begin buying and selling in hundreds more — the company expects to offer services in 2,189 cities by the end of 2020.

“We knew this would be a service that people would want; we didn’t know how many people would want it and how fast,” Coleman said. “One of the biggest challenges we’ve had is trying to scale as quickly as the demand for our services. It’s a good challenge to have, but we continue to push forward and scale to provide this to more people.”

Offerpad has a customer satisfaction rating of 94 percent, according to user reviews from the past 30 days.

“We started Offerpad with the goal of helping customers have a much better experience, and so everything we do is focused on that,” Coleman said. “We’ve recently won some awards for customer service that we’re very proud of. As we’ve gotten the results in, nine out of 10 of our users would use Offerpad again, and nine out of 10 would refer Offerpad to their friends and family.”

Offerpad received five wins at the 13th Annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service in Las Vegas on February 22. The company won gold in the Sales Distinction of the Year category and bronze in the other four for which it was selected: Online Sales Team of the Year, Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year, Contact Center of the Year and Customer Service Department of the Year.

Because home sales involve the participation of multiple entities, the platform is intended to bring all of those parties to one place.

“There are many parties to contact between someone to fix up a house and someone to list a house and a mortgage company and title company and insurance,” Coleman said. “We’re working on bringing all of those into one streamlined process that can all be done through Offerpad.”

Offerpad has about 450 employees — about 250 in Arizona — and it continues to grow. There are a lot of open positions, Coleman said.

“First and foremost, Arizona is our home,” he said. “Brian and I live here and have for a long time; I was born and raised here. We love Arizona, we’ve been starting businesses here in Arizona for over 20 years. We think it’s the best place to both start a business but also to live and to raise a family.”

Arizona is a great place to start a business for several reasons, Coleman said.

“From a regulatory standpoint, from a support from state government standpoint, from a workforce standpoint, we’re making great strides in all of those areas,” he said. “We believe that the future of Arizona will continue to be bright when it comes to starting companies, and specifically technology-based companies.”

Coleman said Offerpad’s Arizona team is excited to move into their new Chandler office, where there will be significantly more space, in just a couple of weeks.

“We’re on top of each other here — one of the challenges of scaling that I mentioned. Very excited about [the new office], and very excited to make this process easier for homeowners. And that really is the goal and the future of Offerpad… continuing to take a better process to more and more homebuyers but continually make that process smoother and more frictionless.”

Offerpad is a sponsor of the 2019 AZ Tech Innovation Summit, featuring keynote speaker Mark Cuban. The Summit welcomes speakers from leading edge tech companies that are driving innovation in Arizona, as well as investors who are powering today’s most exciting startups. To learn more, click here.