In this white-hot market of low inventory, buyers need an agent with ESP: one who knows which homes will be listed even before their owners do — or at least before every other Realtor in town.
For the last several years, in-the-know agents have belonged to private Facebook groups dedicated to hip pocket listings. In Dallas, the most popular Facebook group for savvy agents has been Real Estate Friends, a private group of 800 members, run by Devin Rambie of Legacy Texas Title.
But there’s a new kid in town who wants to let all agents in on the pre-listing party.
Daylon Pereira has launched The Unlisted, a website for agents to share and find hip pocket listings. Already up and running in Dallas, Pereira says The Unlisted is “a place to share non-MLS or pre-MLS properties that combines the best of Facebook with the best of MLS.”
“We see a market where privacy and exclusivity results in additional value for buyers and sellers,” says The Unlisted founder Daylon Pereira.
As a top agent with Allie Beth Allman’s Urban team, Pereira knows the importance of these tools first-hand. Last spring he was helping a client find a house in University Park, but homes entered in MLS were selling so quickly that he had to rely on the sharing of hip pockets to have a fighting chance.
“I looked at the hip pocket list my office created daily and checked Real Estate Friends hourly, really every 30 minutes,” Pereira says. “Though I certainly found the Facebook group to be a helpful tool, the more agents that joined, the longer the news feed became, and honing in on my search criteria was difficult.
“There also wasn’t an effective way of sharing the posts with my clients. So, though the group was a good resource, its limitations were bound by the layout of Facebook.”
He shared his idea for the new platform with a couple of friends (who happen to be business strategists from Stanford) and, by the following week, a plan was in the works. After almost a year, The Unlisted is live in Dallas.
The site is handsome, sleek, clean and extremely user-friendly. All agents have to do is sign up — which requires a real estate license, name, address, ZIP code and password — and they are in. The website houses all the tools agents need — with no limitation on membership, like hip pocket Facebook groups. And there’s no cost to join.
The site already has several unlisted properties in stock, ranging from a $675,000 home on Bowser Avenue to a $7 million listing on Gillon Avenue. “In our first week, we [had] nearly 40 top-producing agents join and several properties uploaded,” Pereira says. And they do go fast: a $375,000 condo on Travis, from a couple of weeks ago, is already gone.
Pereira’s legal consultants have dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s to make sure every pixel of The Unlisted is legal and compliant. It’s a website, not a listing service for hip pockets. Simply put, it’s Real Estate Friends on steroids. Still, Pereira is experiencing some backlash.
The day after he presented the concept to agents at Allie Beth Allman, he was kicked out of the Real Estate Friends Facebook group. “I took Daylon out of the group to protect the integrity,” explains Rambie. “He’s a great friend, but I think agents would be skeptical if I were sharing information with other entities.”
With the Dallas version of The Unlisted off the ground, Pereira’s team plans to open in major cities like Austin, Houston, Miami, Chicago, LA, New York and San Francisco.
“We see a market where privacy and exclusivity results in additional value for buyers and sellers,” Pereira says. “We want to give agents the modern and easy-to-use tools they need to be successful in this ever-changing, fast-paced environment.”
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A version of this story originally appeared on Candy's Dirt.
