Uber enters the real estate world

Garrett Camp, co-founder of the revolutionary online transportation network, Uber has unveiled a new digital platform that is his foray into residential buying and selling.

The platform is called Haus.

Commentary from the Inman website says it’s not trying to compete with the Zillows and realtor.coms in online home search.

Rather, Haus’s main purpose is to digitize the offer submission and acceptance process.

TechCrunch reported the platform lets “sellers put their listing on the platform, where buyers and their agents can both post their offers, amend them, and see an anonymized version of other offers that have been made on the property.”

Haus is only available in California.

With homeowners and buyers able to see the offers, Haus is also touting more transparency in the sales process.

The information available to potential buyers about a listing on Haus includes the terms of the offer in addition to the price.

The Names remain confidential.

“We think the openness will create a more efficient market and that the number of offers and price will ultimately be dependent on demand,” Haus GM Sarah Ham told TechCrunch.

“Bidding wars are a common, almost accepted, part of the real estate process today. But with our approach, buyers know where they stand.

"Buyers will know what they need to offer to make their offer competitive, but they also won’t negotiate against themselves.”

Camp told TechCrunch that “collecting offers and presenting them is a very manual process, the way that town car companies would pick up a phone, write the fare on the board, and send the next available driver to that location.

“It just seems much more efficient for agents to use a platform to coordinate all of this information automatically.”

Currently, Haus is free, but the company may start charging through the broker’s fee once it figures out how to add value to the negotiation process.

The project falls under Expa Studios, of which Camp is CEO.