SimpleShowing Co-Founder Fred McGill Is Changing Real Estate

SimpleShowing is the new way to tour or buy a home. Our Self-Tour technology allows consumers to book property showings online and tour homes independently, without an agent. Our mission is to help make housing more affordable and to help consumers save time and money when buying or selling their home.

I found the process of scheduling home tours and making offers very frustrating and inefficient. I validated this frustration with extensive research to understand what solutions existed for consumers. We set out to improve a process that occurs mostly offline and manually today. Real estate is a space that relies heavily on humans and services, while lacking the modern technology and innovation that we’ve come to expect from other aspects of our lives. 

I previously worked for Salesforce.com as well as a VC backed health tech startup. I also had about 10 years of experience with real estate investment properties prior to starting the company and an MBA from Georgia Tech.

We are in the “early innings” of innovation in the real estate space. With the exception of home search apps, every other aspect of buying a home occurs mostly offline and in a disjointed fashion. 

We believe that the most critical stage of the home buying process occurs when someone actually tours a property. The tour/showing event represents the intersection of when the buyer becomes both emotionally prepared and financially capable of purchasing a home. 

My co-founder Jeremy and I were college roommates. He has extensive experience in real estate investing and finance. Several of our team members have experience with early stage startups — having worked for B2C and B2B companies at various revenue levels. 

Yes, consumers use our services to either buy or sell a home. To that extent, we compete with any traditional real estate brokerage — such as Keller Williams or ReMax. Our Self-Tour product is more differentiated and proprietary. SimpleShowing “Self-Tour” resolves some of the challenges that arise from relying on an agent to find and tour homes. All large brokerages are structured in a way that forces the consumer down an inefficient path of trading phone calls, meetings and negotiating times to see properties. Self-Tour puts the consumer in control of the home touring process, instead of the agent. There are other companies developing solutions similar to SimpleShowing, but none are mainstream yet.

We applied for patent protection in 2020 surrounding our proprietary use of ID verification for a specific process of property access of residential homes. Our patent also involves the use of an integrated physical lock which can be accessed using a one-time use pin issued through our platform.

We primarily earn revenue from home closing transactions. In other words, we receive a commission when someone buys or sells a home with SimpleShowing. We also make money through a joint venture/partnership with a digital title company called Expetitle. This is a new revenue stream as of early 2021. Lastly, our Toura product provides us with a SaaS/recurring revenue stream from subscribers who use the Toura platform. Toura is currently in beta, but we expect it to become a core revenue contributor in the next 12 months.

We began developing the SimpleShowing “search and book” codebase nearly three years ago. We’ve continued to optimize the platform and have continued to see user adoption increase. Over the last year we’ve received interest from countless third parties, including real estate agents, brokerages, and companies who see value in utilizing SimpleShowing’s technology to grow their own businesses.

We had tremendous success attracting investors in late 2019 during our first crowdfunding round. We maxed out our campaign at $1.07 million and brought on nearly 4,000 new investors. For this second crowdfunding campaign, we intend to use the capital to expand our team and accelerate the development and marketing of our Toura product. Having established solid and predictable revenue, we’ve reached an important stage in our business. We believe that a capital infusion will only further boost what we can accomplish from a software development standpoint.

I would point to our track record. We have experienced dependable and predictable growth, even despite the COVID pandemic. After more than three years in business, we’ve discovered exciting growth opportunities that will require additional capital to pursue and execute on. From a timing perspective, this is a fantastic time and stage to invest in our company and also in the broader real estate tech space.

Large real estate technology players like Zillow and CoStar have demonstrated an appetite to acquire upstarts like SimpleShowing. Both have made several acquisitions in the last 12 months alone. Similarly, big real estate brokerage brands are now beginning to form technology evaluation programs, which explore technology acquisitions that might help protect their market share. For example, ReMax is a publicly traded brand that is very active in the M&A space. Similarly, Redfin — which is sort of a blend of a technology and real estate brokerage — is also publicly traded and regularly evaluates building their business through acquisitions. 

We also see a potential exit opportunity via the mortgage industry, because we’re able to attract homebuyers, who ultimately need a mortgage. This could be accelerated with our Self-Tour product, particularly if we are successful in expanding this nationally to third party agents.