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The real estate platform, Orchard, releases new features to make home hunting friendlier and effortless
FREMONT, CA: The vertically integrated platform for the selling and purchase of homes, Orchard, which was formerly known as Perch, is a startup aimed at providing the holistic experience of home buying and selling under a single roof.
Most of the company’s clients are sorted into “dual trackers,” penned by the industry for those who are in the process of selling their house and purchasing a new one at the same time. This is a financially risky predicament, as it forces the buyers to either buy a new home before their house is sold or to confirm on an offer for the new place contingent on the sale of the old home that is highly likely to be unattractive for most sellers.
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Orchard solves this juxtaposition by making an offer on the buyers’ old house that is valid for 90 days. The co-founder of Orchard, Court Cunningham, says that a number higher than 85 percent of the homes usually sell at market price before the 90 day period. The company’s advantage is not only driven by the fact that it gives options to serve every part of the process—searching, titling, and mortgage. The permutation of each of those steps occurs, rather than happening all in the same project.
Orchard has also enhanced its search functionality to enable its users to select via photo the type of the room they are looking for. If the clients are interested in the master bedroom or the kitchen, Orchard lets the client search by the pictures of the room they are interested in, while they look for home options. The real-estate company is also working on a new machine learning-powered search system that will allow the users to shortlist five houses that they love to help the search algorithms find similar homes for a quicker solution.
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Equipped with a team of data scientists, Orchard functions to classify the homes price-wise, making its values as close to the pin as possible. Another significant addition to Orchard is that its realtors are compensated via salary and benefits as opposed to the regular commission structure the other real estate agents live off. These new additions have made Orchard a more interactive and human tech real estate platform that wholly aligns the interests of the real estate agents with the buyer/seller.
In case a home does not sell before the fixed period of 90 days, Orchard purchases the home at a rate that is below the market value through the guaranteed offer. It focuses on making small improvements to the house to help it sell in the market. Orchard underwrites the home again and displays it in the market through a process that the co-founder describes as “much more capital efficient than you think.”
“The greatest challenge is to proliferate and build the tech around this that allows us to deliver in a repeatable way,” said Cunningham. “Buying a home is the biggest financial transaction of someone’s life, and the human element is really important. So we need to grow quickly but in a way that is highly human and highly consistent.”
Orchard recently closed its $36 million worth equity round that was led by Navitas and other investors such as FirstMark Capital, Juxtapose, and Accomplice.
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