Ten-X, formerly known as Auction.com, understands that not every property or transaction is best served by an auction. That’s why its Ten-X Homes platform offers a more traditional non-auction process that takes the components of an offline sale and uses technology to make the process faster and more transparent.
In March, the company launched the new Ten-X Homes platform at SXSW Interactive and plans to continue deploying more complete, more robust feature sets over the next nine to 12 months. Ten-X Homes was designed as a consumer-friendly website that will make it easy for buyers, sellers and their agents to complete a real estate transaction entirely online.
A feature called Transaction Manager takes agents, buyers and sellers through the steps, from accepting an offer to closing. Negotiations are easier, as all offers and counter-offers are managed online, in real time.
“There’s no more confusion about who’s responsible for which tasks, when they’re due or whether or not they’re done,” said Chief Marketing Officer Rick Sharga. “There’s really nothing like the Ten-X Homes platform anywhere else in the real estate industry.”
Ten-X Homes appeals to both institutional and individual investors who want to sell their move-in ready homes to owner-occupants, and is the “only platform today that allows an investor to not only list, but actually sell a property entirely online.”
An investor or an agent representing the investor can manage an individual property or an entire portfolio of homes using the platform, which is designed for sellers or their agents to list properties. Ten-X Homes will handle the transaction details.
“We do all the marketing, and have an established track record of delivering buyers from around the corner and around the world,” Sharga said.
Investors can choose to use an online auction process, or the new non-auction transaction process, depending on the property and the market conditions.
Ten-X Homes is dedicated exclusively to the sale of move-in ready single-family homes, so investor properties will be marketed with other high-quality, non-distressed homes, ensuring the best selling environment, he said.
Auction.com began testing the sale of non-distressed assets on the commercial real estate side first, because typically there’s less emotion involved with commercial property sales, and the parties involved tend to be fairly sophisticated. At the end of 2015, over 60% of the properties it brought to sale were traditional, high-quality, non-distressed assets. The company set a world record last year for the largest online transaction, when it sold the Manhattan Towers office complex near Los Angeles for over $96 million.
“We also ran an extremely successful pilot program called Auction.com Select, where we sold move-in ready, non-distressed single family homes,” Sharga said.
“The pilot program had a 100% sell-through rate, and sold properties at about 96% of list price to owner-occupant buyers – so these weren’t discounted assets being sold to bargain hunters.”
This year, Ten-X Homes is focusing on four markets – Dallas, Denver, Miami and Phoenix – and launched with several hundred properties from a variety of sellers, including financial institutions, asset management companies, investors, a real estate brokerage and a new home builder.
Ten-X’s global reach ensures the widest possible exposure for client properties.
“That’s a big part of our value proposition: We spend tens of millions of dollars marketing properties every year to ensure that as many potential buyers as possible see the properties on our platform,” he said. “We’re one of the largest advertisers on Zillow and Trulia.”
Buyers from over 100 countries use Ten-X Homes’ platform and last year the company targeted China, home to the largest group of foreign buyers, through a partnership with Juwai.com.
Ten-X received Housing Wire’s 2016 Tech 100 Market Potential award for the second year in a row due to its international reach and mobile technology advancements that enable buyers anywhere to use its platform.
“After all, we’re dealing with a generation of home-buyers and sellers who’ve grown up doing virtually everything else online,” Sharga said. “So why not real estate?”
