Home Live: revolutionising real estate with remote engagement

From CRM technology and centralised portals to high-end 3D displays, the real estate industry has kept up with many digital trends. But why just keep up with technology when you can use it to improve and transform?

When Silicon Valley veteran Luke Watson and business partner Jon Tyson learned that the lag-time between property listings and the actual viewings was challenging for real estate agents, they saw an opportunity. 

Streamlining this process full of scheduling conflicts and logistical challenges could save time, money, and effort for both agents and buyers. The right solution could be a significant game-changer. 

And thus a remote engagement platform for livestreamed property viewings was born.

Disrupting industries, not Saturdays

By enabling live, interactive property viewing, Home Live has revolutionised the way buyers engage with properties. It has taken the hassle out of inspections without sidelining real estate agents or removing the human connection.

“I feel that real estate is fundamentally a human-powered industry and would suffer if we tried to make it otherwise,” Watson said.

Livestreaming ultimately achieves the same objectives as face-to-face property viewings but in a way that is more respectful of everyone’s time. 

“I could be sitting on the beach with my family, with my iPad, watching a livestream,” he said, highlighting a sentiment that will resonate with anyone who has wasted several weekends at fruitless viewings.

By streaming on portal listings, agency websites, and social media, agents can showcase properties to an unlimited audience. With all viewer contacts and actionable data automatically fed into their CRM system, they can still access the information they need to build relationships and provide a tailored experience.

Real estate & chill — a global industry shake-up

Home Live isn’t just a technical solution to facilitate remote property viewings. It’s a company with a clear mission — to enable people to connect and transact property on a global scale.

Capitalising on the insatiable appetite for real estate content, Watson envisages a future of cinematic, “Netflix-style” access to property viewings on your TV. 

He sees “a global livestreaming platform where you can tune in to a livestream of a chalet in France and then a ranch in Texas and then a Sydney waterfront… so that you can bounce between these livestreams for entertainment value.”

With Home Live, you could interact with agents and properties anywhere in the world. This kind of “lean-back experience” not only quenches that thirst for escapism (who among us hasn’t daydreamed about owning a luxurious property on the Italian Riviera) but will also, quite literally, open up a world of real estate opportunities for buyers and sellers alike.

“Zoom is more than a tech company”

For visionaries like Watson and Tyson, partnering with a like-minded organisation like Zoom was a natural progression. 

“There is a really strong cultural fit. … They’re not just a tech company. There’s a mission behind what they are doing,” Watson said.

Watson had always thought of Zoom as just meetings and webinars.“I had not really understood that Zoom had opened up their underlying infrastructure … that you can access all of that infrastructure through APIs,” he said.

He was also pleasantly surprised to discover everything Zoom’s technology could do. “I didn’t realize you could do meetings while pretending to sit on a ski lift,” he joked.

“Not having to worry about scale anymore is fantastic”

Taking the commodity streaming layer from their own system and replacing it with Zoom’s Video SDK has allowed Home Live to create a tailored solution for less effort. 

“That’s a real accelerating force for us because it means we have to invest less in engineering resources,” Watson said.

Less time and money spent on infrastructure means more reserves for innovation. 

“We’ve got a very big product roadmap and so being able to execute that with a small team without having to worry about scale is fantastic,” he said.

Zoom’s video streaming includes built-in reliability

Despite the revolutionary technology and glittering future possibilities, the success of Home Live hinges on the reliability of its streaming capabilities.

Streaming technology is not always perfect — network speed and connection type can always impact the streaming experience. But, by using Zoom’s infrastructure, Home Live can rely on built-in reliability features like Zoom’s reactive quality of service layer (which reacts to real-time network and device status), Zoom’s proprietary adaptive Codec in-session layer (which optimises frame rate and resolution) and geographically distributed data centres with failover capability, all of these factors work together to reduce disruption to the user experience.

“We get to leverage those stability and scale features, and that’s really beneficial for us.”

Home Live plans to continue to expand its offerings

Whether it’s saving your Saturdays from laborious viewings or streaming walk-throughs directly into homes all over the world, Home Live will continue to improve its services. 

Although he currently remains tight-lipped, Watson hints at more exciting developments ahead. So when it comes to market disruption and real estate revolutions, it looks like Home Live is just getting started.

Click the video at the top of the page to hear more of Home Live’s story.