New PropTech products aim to help transparency and Covid safety

New PropTech products continue to appear, many aimed at enhancing transparency in buying and selling, or helping agents adopt new ways of working.

One such product, just launched, is mio’s chain view API which the creators claim will, for the first time, allow all parties involved in a sale or purchase to benefit from a single view of the chain.

The new API provides allows any third party to integrate with mio and receive "a well-designed, GDPR compliant view of the chain.” 

Agents have had access to the chain view via the mio sales progression platform for over 18 months with buyers and sellers also benefitting from a simplified view of the chain in the mio app.  

mio managing director Emma Vigus says: “It will have a positive impact on transaction times and fall throughs and be a great asset to any party involved in a sale or purchase. Our API means that we can now offer something of real value in exchange for status updates on each transaction that, for example, a Conveyancer is working on.  

“Buyers and sellers are updated via the mio consumer app and sales progression becomes far easier for Estate Agents. We will continue to focus on increasing the amount of data in mio to benefit estate agents, but some agency branches are already benefitting from close to 60 per cent of mio milestones being fed from automated updates.”

Meanwhile another new PropTech product is PIP Vault which claims to enable buyers and conveyancers to see legal property packs online at the speed currently shown at auctions. 

PIP Vault claims there has been nothing like this for the private treaty market until now and the firm says its product enables sellers, agents and conveyancers to collate and store all relevant documents in one place and make them easily visible to everyone, including prospective buyers, from day one of the marketing campaign.

“Estate Agents can use this simple tool to win more business as it'll differentiate them, have less fall throughs and quicker exchanges as well as gaining detailed information and data on interested buyers looking at the documents in the PIP Vault” says a statement from the company.

The company is running a free offer to agents until April 2021 and thereafter the price will be £25 per property, invoiced on a successful exchange of contracts.

Meanwhile another PropTech firm, AgentRelay, has developed technology which it says allows agents to undertake accompanied, virtual property viewings.

With integrated video conferencing, chat messaging capability and security modes built separately for both private and open viewings, AgentRelay “arms agents with a flexible tool to undertake initial viewings in a safer and more convenient manner, meeting the needs of modern time-poor, digital-savvy customers, whilst also limiting exposure to COVID related risks” it says. 

The technology runs directly in the browser on desktop computers, tablets and smartphones, with integration into Matterport; there are no software downloads or insecure screen-sharing to manage.