Driving Disruption: Tim Quirk Of Final Offer On The Innovative Approaches They Are Taking To Disrupt Their Industries
An Interview With Cynthia Corsetti
Giving our customer base the opportunity to invest in our product. Currently, we have taken on over 70 agents — not just as investors, but as strategic partners. As partners that believe in our mission and value proposition, they are just as invested as we are in seeing Final Offer succeed.
In an age where industries evolve at lightning speed, there exists a special breed of C-suite executives who are not just navigating the changes, but driving them. These are the pioneers who think outside the box, championing novel strategies that shatter the status quo and set new industry standards. Their approach fosters innovation, spurs growth, and leads to disruptive change that redefines their sectors. In this interview series, we are talking to disruptive C-suite executives to share their experiences, insights, and the secrets behind the innovative approaches they are taking to disrupt their industries. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Tim Quirk.
As Co-Founder of Final Offer, a groundbreaking platform bringing transparency to the home buying and selling process, Tim Quirk draws on years of entrepreneurial experience to lead the rapidly growing business. With a successful track record scaling angel, venture-backed and public companies from start to exit, Tim is executing the go-to-market strategy that will transform the real estate market as we know it today.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about disruption, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
My journey in entrepreneurship began in college when I started at Babson College. Consistently ranked as the top entrepreneurship program globally, people from all over the world enroll at Babson to learn how to successfully run a business. I took a lot away from my experience there. Moving forward, early on in my career, every position I held had to do with bringing new products to market or creating new lines of business. In 2011 I joined an outstanding team of entrepreneurs, two of which, Judd Hoffman and Danko Fatovic, are my co-founders in my newest venture Final Offer, to build and later sell Erecruit, a leading enterprise software platform used by the largest staffing and recruiting companies globally.
The common theme amongst the companies I’ve worked on has been their ability to touch people’s lives in a big way. So, when we started discussing the opportunity to disrupt the real estate industry for the better with Kevin Caulfield, a top real estate broker in Boston, and realized just how impactful our platform could be for all parties, we all knew we had to pursue this once in a generation opportunity.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
What makes Final Offer stand out is that we are the only company bringing complete transparency to the way real estate is negotiated.
Think about it: The home buying and selling process has remained largely unchanged in over 100 years. With the invention of the Internet, while prospective buyers now have insight into the details of the property (number of rooms, square footage, etc.), they still have absolutely no information when it comes to the negotiation on either side of the transaction. As a buyer, we’re left asking — is there interest on the property? Am I competing with someone when I make an offer? As a seller — am I getting the best price and terms by accepting this offer? We can get updates on our bloodwork at the same time as our doctor. Why can’t we get alerts the moment an offer is made on a property? With today’s current system, everyone is left in the dark. With Final Offer our thesis is simple: can bringing transparency to the offer and negotiation process be a win for buyers, sellers and the industry? Can it be an experience that is enjoyable, with less stress and anxiety throughout? We are proving the answer is yes.
We want to create a better experience when it comes to buying and selling a home, for everyone involved in the process. That is why we developed Final Offer — to challenge the status quo and introduce consumer-facing technology right into the heart of the offer and negotiation process. The transparency Final Offer provides allows sellers and their agents to act more strategically, while giving buyers the clarity and confidence they need to make an offer they know will be accepted.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success?
Three traits that have contributed to my success as a leader are putting people first, being customer obsessed, and constantly challenging those around me.
First, I am a big believer in the notion that a company is only as great as its people. Having strong relationships in your ecosystem is invaluable. The people around you will support you through the ups and downs and ultimately help you grow.
Second, in my work, I pride myself in being customer-obsessed. It all goes back to wanting to create something that would touch people’s lives in a meaningful way. When you genuinely believe in the power of your product, those around you will feel inspired to do the same.
Finally, I strive to challenge those around me. Whether it’s with my employees or customers, it’s important to challenge others to think of things through a new lens and offer out-of-the-box perspectives that help them unlock creativity and solutions to problems.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. In the context of a business, what exactly is “Disruption”?
Disruption at its core is a challenge to the status quo. Its bold thinking that asks if there’s a better way to get the job done. With Final Offer, we’re striving to fundamentally improve how the residential real estate industry operates so that it can be a faster, more efficient, and trusted process for all.
How do you perceive the role of ‘disruption’ within your industry, and how have you personally embraced it? Is it a necessity, a strategy, or something else entirely in your view?
The time is now to disrupt the real estate industry for the better. We’ve polled several hundreds of agents asking if they trust the way other agents do business. More than 90% of them say they do not. If they don’t trust each other, how can consumers trust the process?
Agents and brokerages that run great businesses, that are truly a fiduciary to their clients and provide tremendous value — their businesses suffer from the small percentage of bad actors that give the industry a bad reputation. Look at the restaurant industry. They developed the concept of the open kitchen. You can now trust that your food is being cooked in a healthy and safe environment where the staff is being treated with respect.
We are bringing the open kitchen concept to real estate. There has been no way for agents to prove that they hold themselves to high ethical standards, until Final Offer. Agents that become Final Offer Certified and that negotiate with complete transparency now have a powerful tool to showcase they uphold ethical standards and fair practices, all while giving consumers more information they can trust to make the best decision for themselves in the largest transaction of their lives. It’s not just our belief, more than 70 top real estate agents have invested millions into our company, believing that transparency is not just the way of the future, that it’s good for business.
Disruptive ideas often meet resistance. Could you describe a time when you faced significant pushback for a disruptive idea? How did you navigate the opposition, and what advice would you give to others in a similar situation?
When we first test marketed our platform in Spring of 2022, we found out quickly that we had something that was intriguing and groundbreaking to both consumers and agents. Consumers were awestruck that they could scan a QR code and get real-time offer alerts and that they could actually see when an offer was made. They continually said, “why hasn’t’ this existed, it’s so obvious.” We even had consumers in open houses say in front of their real estate agents that they wanted to invest in our company. It was that groundbreaking.
That said, what we didn’t anticipate was the backlash we received from the real estate community, the very audience we meant to service. In our minds we had built a platform that made their lives easier and more efficient, saving them countless hours of wasted time while giving them a tool to capture leads, generate more business and grow market share. Instead, we faced real estate agents questioning the value that they provide to their clients and whether Final Offer would make them irrelevant. Was Final Offer’s real goal to cut them out or steal their commissions? We heard this a lot. Obviously, this is opposite response we were going for.
What was at the root of the problem? We were not yet charging for the service. We gave it away to agents for free to test the product and receive feedback. By not being forthcoming with how we were going to charge, agents that represented buyers saw us as a threat.
We navigated the situation by simply publishing our future pricing model, which was, and is, a subscription that agents pay to use the service. We don’t charge consumers or take a percentage of the agents commission as they feared.
The experience taught us a valuable lesson — be transparent about your business model. Our entire business is based on transparency and trust, and yet we left out this important piece of information that cast doubt with the very community we built the company to serve. So, as for advice, I would say be upfront and transparent with your goals and plans for the future. Trust takes time to build yet can be broken in a flash. Be obsessed with building value and doing right by your customer. Things will work themselves out.
What are your “Five Innovative Approaches We Are Using To Disrupt Our Industry”?
- Giving our customer base the opportunity to invest in our product. Currently, we have taken on over 70 agents — not just as investors, but as strategic partners. As partners that believe in our mission and value proposition, they are just as invested as we are in seeing Final Offer succeed.
- We’re teaching real estate professionals a modern methodology that blends technology, game theory, and psychology to market and negotiate real estate in a new way from how the industry has historically worked. With Final Offer, we’re giving both the agent and the consumer the power to decide what information is transparent to bring more clarity to the home buying and selling process.
- We’re providing more trust in the industry with real time offer alerts. The technology is simple — we have it with everything nowadays from Uber to email. But it’s revolutionary because it’s something that’s never been done before in the residential real estate industry and in the largest transaction of most peoples’ lives.
- We’ve purposely partnered with influential real estate professionals to bring the product to market and command attention. Their visibility and reach has proven to be a successful tool for us and them, increasing the credibility of the product while they grow their businesses.
- We hire people who show a passion for what we’re doing. As I said, a company is only as good as its people, and we take pride in hiring the right talent to propel Final Offer’s mission.
In your role as a C-suite leader, driving innovation and embracing disruption, what thoughts or concerns keep you awake at night? How do these reflections guide your decisions and leadership?
When you look at the headlines, you can see there’s a lot of change currently happening in the residential real estate space. From class action lawsuits with the power to change how the industry generates income, to keeping up with consumer demands, to outside pressures when it comes to interest rates and low inventory.
Through all of this change, we see a huge opportunity for Final Offer to solve many of the big problems faced by the industry: a lack of trust, no accountability for upholding ethical standards and fair practices, and consumers’ demand for the transaction to be faster and more transparent. Our goal is to scale quickly while maintaining our high quality of service. We are on a hiring spree in search of top talent to support our customers as we grow. For example, after seeing initial success in Boston and Washington DC, we recently expanded to Iowa and North Carolina due to partnerships with leading brokerages in those states wanting to offer a more transparent home buying and selling experience to consumers in their markets. This demand from brokerages is heating up. We are launching several more states in the next few months in conjunction with brokerages bringing the Final Offer platform to their local markets.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on LinkedIn and learn more about Final Offer on our website and 90 second video. You can also follow Final Offer on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Cynthia Corsetti is an esteemed executive coach with over two decades in corporate leadership and 11 years in executive coaching. Author of the upcoming book, “Dark Drivers,” she guides high-performing professionals and Fortune 500 firms to recognize and manage underlying influences affecting their leadership. Beyond individual coaching, Cynthia offers a 6-month executive transition program and partners with organizations to nurture the next wave of leadership excellence.
