Biju Ashokan,
Co-founder of Radius
Can you share the inspiration that led you to identify the opportunity for Radius Agent in the real estate market? How did you envision it addressing a specific need within the industry?
My previous startup was a real estate brokerage. Our day to day operations were becoming increasingly complex as we grew in size until it hit a saturation point. This is when I knew there was an opportunity for an operating system for brokerages and real estate agents in a brokerage. Then I did a year of user research on validating this business model. The research only proved that producing real estate team leaders faced the same challenges I used to face. Since then, we have been focused on launching different features that can help agents and team leaders in making their work lives simpler with Radius.
Expansion is often a key strategy for successful businesses. What are your short to mid-term plans for Radius Agent in terms of geographical expansion or service enhancements to further support real estate professionals?
Our goal is to increase our market share of real estate transactions. The best way to do this is through real estate agents who close 92% of all real estate transactions in the US.
Our short term expansion plan to acquire real estate agents is two-fold.
- Keep developing our AI enabled tech to become a more complete operating system for small and medium sized independent brokerages with an active consumer interface. This will make us attractive to more and more brokerages and continue our high retention rates.
- Expand our brokerage services including mortgage brokerage services to 6 more states beyond California (Texas, Florida, Georgia, Washington, Oregon, Colorado)
Our mid-term expansion plan is:
- Open our now complete AI Brokerage operating system to all independent brokerages country wide.
- Become a direct mortgage lender to further increase commissions earned per transaction.
In the evolving world of real estate technology, what role do you see Radius playing in staying ahead of industry trends and ensuring that agents have access to cutting-edge tools and resources?
Radius will be in the forefront of automating brokerage technology using AI. All our products will have one purpose: to automate workflows of real estate agents and team leaders so that each of our agents can represent more transactions and close more deals.
Distribution: In parallel, we will expand our community of real estate agents which will provide us with a great distribution platform for our tools and technology.
The real estate landscape is highly competitive. How does Radius distinguish itself in terms of the services and support it provides to agents?
- Unlike most brokerage models, we help real estate agent entrepreneurs create their own independent brokerages under our platform, which makes us extremely unique.
- Radius launches services and technology that are first of its kind, helps automate workflows of real estate agents, saving them more time and helping them close more transactions.
- A strong community of real estate professionals that all our brokerage agents are always connected to, for referrals, Q&A, support, advice, discussions, etc.
- Last but not the least, providing our agents with agent-friendly economics so that they retain more of the commissions.
Radius Agent is known for its agent-centric approach. Can you elaborate on the challenges real estate professionals face that your platform aims to solve, and how does it uniquely empower them in comparison to traditional brokerages?
Challenges agents faced today by agents that we aim to solve are:
- Lack of an ecosystem to start their own brokerage. Most traditional brokerages want to recruit these agents to represent their brand. We aim to provide a comprehensive platform to support ambitious entrepreneurial agents to start their own brokerage.
- Lack of AI powered automation that makes it easier for real estate agents to provide a great customer experience to their buyers and sellers, especially when it comes to searching and closing phases of the workflow. Traditional brokerages don’t lean in on technology to support their agents.
- Lastly, traditional brokerages are very expensive for real estate agents because of high commission splits.
