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Dallas Realtor & broker Clay Stapp just got back from New York City, where he and his biz partner, James Bohan-Pitt, proudly introduced their start-up we told you about last week, HipPocket, to the tech world at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Disrupt is an annual conference hosted by TechCrunch in San Francisco, New York City, and Beijing.
James is the CEO & Co-Founder of HipPocket. Not a Realtor, but he is a product strategy, marketing and business launch specialist with experience that includes three Fidelity Investments telecoms and technology portfolio companies and a number of technology startups, including, of course, HipPocket.
Let me tell you how cool it is they were there: TechCrunch is the Holy Grail of the tech world. Getting written up is one huge kudo, showing off to all the investors who follow the news website at Disrupt is another. Attendees go there to showcase their products, network, gain insights from others, get publicity and seek investors.
TC was started by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare in 2005. In 2010, AOL acquired the site for somewhere between $25 and $40 million. It has a huge and juicy global readership of investors, tech titans, venture capitalists and high net worth movers and shakers. Like any growing- at- a- ridiculous- pace site, they’ve had their problems. But the site was also the basis of a reality TV show that starred Mark Zuckerberg’s sister, Arielle Zuckerberg, in the HBO series Silicon Valley.
I dialed up Clay today and asked how his three days near Madison Square Garden went and was he exhausted?
“Got back late Wednesday night,” he said, ” had to plunge into work early Thursday.”
He said HipPocket stirred a lot of excitement and attracted many series A investors. They worked their arses off. At some points, they were giving demos to eager attendees every five minutes — couldn’t explain it fast enough. They also got great feedback on product design, user experience and features. Recall that HipPocket is a private social network for licensed Realtors: the app does a small verification step to check licenses, which is being done manually at this point but will soon be automated. HipPocket will also benefit from automatic Apple IOS updates making the app as up-to-date as your iPhone.
“We’ve got 400-plus Realtors signed up already, and will have more than a thousand by month’s end,” said Clay. “We’ve just got to build out DFW and prove that it works.”
The site is available nationally, and those national agents will likely come later this year when Clay and James take HipPocket to Inman Real Estate Connect in San Francisco and NAR.
“Micro social networks are very hot right now,” says Clay. “Facebook cannot be everything.”
James has told me that up to 40 percent of real estate properties are marketed outside of the MLS, most of them in the the LBJ Loop. We are not the only market experiencing this phenomenon. This forces agents to spend inordinate amounts of time texting, emailing and posting on Facebook. It is also why Facebook groups such as Facebook Friends have become so popular. With Texas being a non-disclosure state, and real estate taxes tied to sales prices, more and more buyers want a way to keep their transactions private with the Real Estate community.
This is also how the Empire is striking back: many agents are souring on the MLS handing out data to third party sites such as Zillow and Trulia and feel that sites such as HipPocket and The Unlisted are the way agents will re-gain control of their lifeblood — information — and re-gain control of the marketplace.
HipPocket is now available to download in the Apple App Store.
