Yaza
Cultivating Innovative Home Buying Experience

A picture says thousands of words while a video tells the entire story, and people love stories. That's why players across different sectors today rely on video marketing to reach their audience and cast an indelible impression in their minds. Recognizing the immense potential of video technology, a Silicon Valley-based public benefit corporation—Yaza Society PBC—is moving the needle in the real-estate space. The company has designed an app for real estate professionals to help them record, map, and share video home tours with buyers.

Historically, a real estate agent used to provide a long list of properties to their customers. After long explanations and negotiations, they take clients on live visits to property or apartments. This was not only inconvenient and time-consuming for realtors but also for homebuyers. To this end, Yaza turned out to be a real game-changer for the real estate industry, transforming the way realtors work. It offers a faster and easier tour of the property, providing homebuyers with every detail about its condition—whether the house is old, new, or properly maintained.

Yaza app enables real-estate agents to shoot high-quality videos using their smartphones and efficiently edit them to create home tours that tell the story of a house and its surroundings for better customer engagement. As a result, realtors do not need to commute all day long visiting places with customers or contractors and can save significant time. "Yaza is widely accepted in real-estate industry due to its ability to provide a convenient house tour within few minutes," mentions Peter Sisson, CEO and Co-Founder of Yaza. Truly, the app equips realtors with the opportunity to make videos an integral part of their sales process.

"Though video technology is playing a key role in eliminating the dysfunctional work environment of making numerous calls, emails, texts, and visits, verification of these videos is equally necessary to ensure their authenticity," mentions Trevor Laehy, Co-Founder and President at Yaza. To this end, the company guarantees each video's authenticity using its Certified Reality technology. Yaza uses date and time stamps overlaid on maps to authenticate the exact time and place a video was shot.

Though video technology is playing a key role in eliminating the dysfunctional work environment of making numerous calls, emails, texts, and visits, verification of these videos is equally necessary to ensure their authenticity

Moreover, the video is stored in the cloud and requires the creator's permission to share. "Yaza ensures that video is not being duplicated. It plays a vital role to build trust between agents and buyers," says Laehy, who has also been nominated for the HousingWires Rising Star award. Additionally, its unique map-based interface allows agents to find and share listings with prospects based on location without breaking a sweat.

Yaza partners with the most prominent players in the video technology space to continually enhance its platform, accelerate visualization in the prop-tech industry and help realtors sell houses. For example, an agent in San Francisco struggled to arrange the home visit for his buyers as both the spouse were in different locations. After the listing, the realtor designed video tours of each property using Yaza. The video tours enabled buyers to decide that the listed properties were not meeting their expectations and requirements. This saved time for both the agent and buyers, eliminating unnecessary house visits. The buyers shortlisted a few homes via video tours and quickly finalized a property after visiting two or three houses in person.

Having carved a unique niche in the video technology space, the product team, under Sisson's guidance, spends significant time diligently studying market trends to gain a competitive advantage over other players. The company also keeps track of agents' needs and challenges of selling properties by regularly engaging and communicating with them. With these insights and video as a tool, Yaza re-envisions how the real-estate industry interacts with each other. "We want to ensure that we power the upcoming change—as the industry progresses towards digitization—by providing realtors and contractors with the right tools to work in the new environment," concludes Laehy.