Photo via Shutterstock
Photo via Shutterstock

Today, nearly all home searches start online, and buyers can find valuable information about a home within a couple of clicks. But some don’t believe the real estate industry has changed enough.

Take San Francisco-based Opendoor, for example. Yesterday, it launched a new service that automates the home-buying process even further.

The company is hoping to streamline every step of the process, from touring a home to making an offer and signing the paperwork. It even fixes up the house (with new paint, flooring and appliances) and does a pre-inspection to make it move-in ready. While the company’s home-buying services are new, Opendoor launched a service in December for sellers, which allows them to get a quote online for a home and sell it within three to 60 days.

opendoorWhile the first wave of innovation in the real estate industry was focused on transparency, with companies, like Zillow and Trulia, providing hard-to-find information about homes online, and with Redfin disrupting real estate commissions, this second wave is all about e-commerce — and making the transaction happen faster and more easily online, like Amazon does with just about everything else.

Opendoor says its value is simple: For home buyers, it provides move-in ready homes with high-end renovations. For home sellers, it provides an offer in minutes so that you can sell whenever you’re ready.

Speed is a factor, but obviously so is price. Opendoor charges the seller a 5.5 percent fee to buy their home, which is close to what traditional agents charge. The company says it also considers the price it asks for homes fair, and are based on location and the home’s characteristics.

Right now, the service is only live in Phoenix, but the company plans to roll it out in additional markets this summer, including Dallas.

Opendoor, which has raised $30 million to date from a number of well-known venture capitalists, was founded by former Square COO and PayPal executive Keith Rabois and Eric Woo, Opendoor’s CEO, who previously founded Movity.com, a location data analytics company that was acquired by Trulia.com in 2011. Other founders include Ian Wong and JD Ross.

Fortune wrote about Tuesday’s launch, but additional information is also available on the company’s website.

One way it wants to automate the home shopping process is by making it more efficient to tour a home. After receiving an address for a property, customers can show up at the home and use their mobile phone to receive an access code to enter the house. People are not required to bring an agent, so the company monitors activity using Dropcam security cameras, Fortune reports.

homesearch“Ninety-plus percent of home searches start online, but it’s still pretty painful to view a home,” Opendoor’s Wu told Fortune.

Opendoor is not the only company trying to disrupt the real estate industry, by enabling transactions to occur online.

SolutionStar, a profitable division of Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, is gearing up to relaunch HomeSearch.com, which will let anyone purchase a home over the Internet in one click. The company is emphasizing automating the process, from finding an agent to getting a mortgage and signing the final paperwork. In return, it’s offering customers 1 percent back on their purchase.

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