This article was originally published by HousingWire, an HW Media publication dedicated to serving mortgage and real estate professionals.
Startup DOSS launched its website to the public on July 10 with the goal of “making homeownership in America more affordable.”
That educational and transitional site will only be live for 6 months. Then, the company has plans to launch a voice-activated search portal. Founder Bobby Bryant also recently launched the Houston-based company’s contactless MLS listing program called DOSS BASIC.
Bryant says he created DOSS with the belief that his company could drastically improve home search via an Intelligent Assistant built into a proprietary real estate search engine.
“We automate and streamline the entire process to reduce transactional fragmentation. By doing that, we can reduce the historically high cost to transact real estate. In the course of building the company, our mission statement then became very clear: to develop the best technology to make homeownership in America more affordable,” Bryant told HousingWire.
With DOSS, consumers can speak, text, or type any question about any property to get instant answers, Bryant said. Users can submit offers, negotiate a deal online, upload properties onto the platform directly and without an agent, purchase property documents that otherwise would require a trip to the local courthouse or permit building, and set property value timers, he added.
“Our competitors are built on a graphical user interface (GUI) that offers limited pre-filtered search boxes that provide limited search results. DOSS uses an Intelligent User Interface (IUI) that gives the user the free reign to ask what they want and how they want it as if they are talking to an actual person,” Bryant added.
Xspaced
Xspaced plans to formally launch in August with the goal of helping tenants and landlords create flexible installment plans for missed rent or security deposits.
Xspaced co-founder Alex Pelin says he’s been working in real estate technology for seven years. In the past two and a half years, in particular, he has been conducting research on how fintech and proptech could be married to provide housing accessibility and eventually lead to making housing more affordable at scale.
“Since the start of Covid-19 many tenants and landlords have faced challenges related to making timely rent payments. Besides the rental payment challenges there has been a growing lack of empathy from both landlords and tenants,” he told HousingWire. “While we can’t fix all the challenges facing landlords and tenants in one day, week or month, we have to start somewhere.”
Ultimately, Xspaced wants to help landlords and tenants do things like create installment plans for missed rent or security deposit in less than 1 minute; share the plan with their counterparty and make or receive installment or regular rent payments online.
Shortly after launch, the company plans to add features aiming to make it easier for tenants to budget and make monthly payments for regular or missed rent and security deposits, on time.
“We’ve started the company with the mission to build fintech products for landlords and tenants that enable financial wellness and open access to housing at scale,” Pelin said. “And there is no better time to offer help than during a crisis.”