Growing technology in Real Estate
2018 in Review: New clients, a bigger team, and exciting platform updates
2018 was a pivotal year for Spark.
We began in 2012 with a small group — Simeon Garratt, Cody Curley, and Ryan Ilg — who saw an unfulfilled niche in the new development landscape and thought to try their hand at meeting it. Over the last six years, that grew into a product, which grew into Spark. This year alone, we doubled the size of the team!
In the real estate industry, we saw some big shifts: Compass’s pivot to technology service; fears of brokerage collapse; rumours of a downward market trend. Spark sponsored conferences, presented at events, and spoke to a lot of you about technology and the changing real estate landscape.
These conversations were the root of many of Spark’s product updates. The development team pushed out 519 new instances of code to the platform, encapsulating product improvements, updates, and new features that change the game for many of our clients.
We’re excited to see how technology is driving the real estate industry to adapt — and how our clients will use our platform to meet it!
New Office, Bigger Team
If you haven’t heard, Spark has officially moved into a brand new office.
We’ve doubled the team since the beginning of the year, with a strong focus on growing our Sales and Development departments. This gives us the additional bandwidth and personnel we need to press forward with the product improvements and whole new features that our clients have been excited to see come into fruition!
As we grow, it’s been important to us to preserve the culture and closeness that we and our clients value so highly. Our clients appreciate being able to chat to us about their wants and needs — and we appreciate the frankness and being able to hear it!
That’s why a high priority item this year was to add new members to our customer success and marketing teams. We want to make sure that, as our clientbase and clients grow, we’re ready to help support their success.
Overall, 2018 gave Spark the opportunity to spread our wings. And with 6000 square feet, there’s plenty of room to grow.
An Exciting Expansion
Our clients are the best part of Spark. You’re the reason that our platform is so robust — the concerns you tell our customer success team make it right back to product development, and we pay heed to them as we plan out the roadmap. That’s our not-so-secret recipe for success.
The majority of our clients have projects in New York and Vancouver. These include some of the best developers in Canada and the United States—SHAPE, Beedie, and Extell, just to name a few.
This year, we were able to grow our client family, adding some recognizable names that we’re proud and excited to work with. A recently signed client in New Zealand means we’re starting to expand to the land down under.
We view each one of our clients as an opportunity to better our product. Features and improvements to our reporting, inventory, contracts, and more, all begin with conversations with you. So a big thank you to all of our clients and industry friends!
Delivering the Product
Two of our most anticipated releases this year were custom reports and multiple contracts.
Custom reports take our legacy reporting to the next level, allowing clients to customize the information they report on, as well as how they display it. The feature is still in beta and has been actively updated since its initial release to fix up bugs, add more widgets, and to better understand what our clients want and expect from it.
Over the past few months, we’ve received a lot of great feedback and seen some pretty impressive reports generated out of the feature, so we’re excited to keep on building it out!
Contracts were one of our primary focuses for optimization in 2018. Multiple contracts refer to the addition of allowing more than one contract per inventory. This addition has made it easier not only to track competing offers, but also to maintain a more thorough historical record of deals that have been assigned, or for whatever other reason, didn’t go through. If an accepted contract is rescinded and there were other offers available, admins can restore them without having to start from scratch, even if those other offers were archived.
A few other features that deserve honourable mention are:
• Sending out multiple files for DocuSign signing in the same email/envelope
• Calendar subscription integration for iCalendar, Outlook and Google Calendar
• Project-wide inventory price history (visible on the inventory overview)
These are just a few of the many additions we’ve made over the past year. The cumulative effect of many small features has made a huge impact on the software in that time, and with our boost in developer-power, we look forward to pushing it even farther in 2019!
Taking the Lead
We’ve always prided ourselves on our industry know-how at Spark. We were founded, and continue to be led by, industry professionals who put their expert knowledge to use every day, helping to create a tool that can benefit developers and improve the buyer experience.
As part of that, we were very honoured this year to sponsor and speak at several industry events!
Spark was at a few Inman Connect conferences over the year, including San Francisco and the Luxury Connect event in Los Angeles. We provided sponsorships, tabled in the technology hall, and hosted a discussion on pitching and winning new developments. The team met some amazing brokers and developers who are pushing the envelope and setting a new bar for the industry.
Locally, we were actively involved with both the Urban Land Institute and Urban Development Institute. We co-sponsored a few luncheons, including an insightful talk from Urban Analytics about the future of real estate, and also spoke on innovation in real estate technology alongside Deloitte US.
We’re a huge proponent of technology innovation. At Spark, we strongly believe that more intuitive, well-designed software is the way to make the real estate industry as a whole more efficient, intelligent, and future-friendly.
The State of Real Estate in 2019
As we wrap up for the year, we’re excited to see how the industry will develop in 2019. Trends like millennials moving to the suburbs, buyer preference for amenities and transit-friendliness, and the growth of multi-family development are just a few things we’ll be keeping an eye on.
Email us at hello@spark.re if you have questions, comments, or just want to talk to us about our all-in-one platform. You can also visit us at spark.re to learn more.
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This article was co-written with Shannon McDonald.
