Orchard, formerly Perch, is sprinting towards its goal of having a fully integrated home buying and selling platform, from title and mortgage services to its tech-focused real estate brokerage to a consumer search portal. They company has many plates spinning at once, one could say.
Today, Orchard is announcing new features for its home search portal in the form of Home Match and Photo Switch.
Home Match gives users the chance to specify the degree of their preferences to filter search results down to the stuff they really want. For example, users can choose between “Not Important,” “Nice to Have” and “Very Important” for features like a Kitchen Island, a pool in the backyard, high ceilings and many other features of a home.
Most home search portals ask about what you want in a binary way — either you want a pool or you don’t. They don’t take into account that yes, you want a pool, but it’s not nearly as important as having stainless steel appliances in the kitchen.
“Our view is that search is nowhere near a solved problem in the real estate space,” said Court Cunningham, CEO and founder of Orchard. “The insight is that when you watch people search, they look at every home coming on the market and when you ask why they aren’t using filters, they say they don’t want to miss anything. So we put some gradation on that search filter to give users much more relevant results and save them time.”
Alongside Home Match, Orchard is also introducing Photo Switch, a smaller feature but a vastly more technical tool to build.
Photo Switch allows users to choose the lead image on any home listing to see the part of the house they’re most interested in. For example, folks whose priority is a back yard can see pics of the back yard as they browse through listings. Same for the kitchen, the master bedroom, the front yard and the living room.
Again, this allows users to make their own choices about their priorities and save time by focusing on those priorities as they search.
Cunningham says that the new features, which have been in beta for several weeks, are deepening engagement on listings, with more people clicking through listing pages and details instead of shuffling around the top-level search results.
Orchard focuses on dual-trackers, or people who are both selling a home and buying a new one at the same time. This situation, which is very common among home buyers, usually forces those buyers to either take on a huge financial risk by buying a new home before they’ve sold their last home, or to place an offer on their new home contingent on the sale of their old home, which is unattractive to most sellers.
Orchard solves this by making an offer on buyers’ old houses that is guaranteed for 90 days. In January, Cunningham said that more than 85% of those homes sell at a market price before the 90-day period.
Orchard also offers a title business, letting buyers close the transaction via their phone from the comfort of their home, with plans to go live with mortgage services in the near future.
The company has raised a total of $86 million in equity financing, from investors like FirstMark Capital, Navitas, and Juxtapose, with another $200 million in debt financing.
TORONTO – One expert predicts Ottawa‘s changes to mortgage rules will help spur demand among potential homebuyers but says policies aimed at driving new supply are needed to address the “core issues” facing the market.
The federal government’s changes, set to come into force mid-December, include a higher price cap for insured mortgages to allow more people to qualify for a mortgage with less than a 20 per cent down payment.
The government will also expand its 30-year mortgage amortization to include first-time homebuyers buying any type of home, as well as anybody buying a newly built home.
CIBC Capital Markets deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal calls it a “significant” move likely to accelerate the recovery of the housing market, a process already underway as interest rates have begun to fall.
However, he says in a note that policymakers should aim to “prevent that from becoming too much of a good thing” through policies geared toward the supply side.
Tal says the main issue is the lack of supply available to respond to Canada’s rapidly increasing population, particularly in major cities.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17,2024.
OTTAWA – The Canadian Real Estate Association says the number of homes sold in August fell compared with a year ago as the market remained largely stuck in a holding pattern despite borrowing costs beginning to come down.
The association says the number of homes sold in August fell 2.1 per cent compared with the same month last year.
On a seasonally adjusted month-over-month basis, national home sales edged up 1.3 per cent from July.
CREA senior economist Shaun Cathcart says that with forecasts of lower interest rates throughout the rest of this year and into 2025, “it makes sense that prospective buyers might continue to hold off for improved affordability, especially since prices are still well behaved in most of the country.”
The national average sale price for August amounted to $649,100, a 0.1 per cent increase compared with a year earlier.
The number of newly listed properties was up 1.1 per cent month-over-month.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
MONTREAL – Two Quebec real estate brokers are facing fines and years-long suspensions for submitting bogus offers on homes to drive up prices during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Christine Girouard has been suspended for 14 years and her business partner, Jonathan Dauphinais-Fortin, has been suspended for nine years after Quebec’s authority of real estate brokerage found they used fake bids to get buyers to raise their offers.
Girouard is a well-known broker who previously starred on a Quebec reality show that follows top real estate agents in the province.
She is facing a fine of $50,000, while Dauphinais-Fortin has been fined $10,000.
The two brokers were suspended in May 2023 after La Presse published an article about their practices.
One buyer ended up paying $40,000 more than his initial offer in 2022 after Girouard and Dauphinais-Fortin concocted a second bid on the house he wanted to buy.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
Again, this allows users to make their own choices about their priorities and save time by focusing on those priorities as they search.
