“Despite all the money being poured into digitizing stuff, people still love their agent.”
This might seem like an unusual mantra to build a digital platform on. Nestfully—an MLS collaborative consumer portal officially launching today—looks on the surface similar to the other big-name websites that have relentlessly worked to turn real estate into a data-centric, automation-driven, ad-revenue focused business. It offers a sleek landing page, carousels of listing photos, and all the now-mandatory property data points: from school scores to a mortgage calculator.
But beneath the hood and behind the curtain, Nestfully aims to be something truly different—both for consumers and the agents and brokers who serve them—as it enters the portal space as an industry answer to the tech-centric powerhouses.
“We’re not in the game of monetizing consumers,” explains Amit Kulkarni, chief marketing officer at Bright MLS, one of three large MLSs leading Nestfully. “We want to help brokers display properties in an open way so all consumers can see them, and then connect with folks to get the property sold.”
Announced earlier this year, Nestfully is a joint venture of Bright and CRMLS, joined by REcolorado at launch. BeachesMLS and the Miami Association of REALTORS® plan to join in Q2 of this year. Bright CEO Brian Donnellan previously called the project “industry-positive,” open to collaboration across the real estate and MLS landscape. 
The plan, according to REcolorado CEO Gene Millman, is to start with a powerful but straightforward platform that “combines technology with the core value of connecting consumers to local brokers and agents.”
“No gimmicks, no paid placement, just direct connections to the local pros that can help best,” he tells RISMedia via email.
No buyer is going to scroll past a banner ad for deodorant on Nestfully, or have their data shipped off to the highest bidder, Kulkarni promises. Only once someone requests information about a property or listing is that passed on to a listing agent.
“Consumers are completely anonymous until they decide not to be anonymous,” Kulkarni describes.
And no agent will have to pay for leads that are generated off their own listings—something that the Nestfully team has emphasized since the platform’s initial announcement.
It is through these commitments and principles that Nestfully promises to differentiate, building the real estate portal experience around the essential and immutable dynamics between the agent, the consumer and the property—with tech facilitating instead of headlining. Rather than trying to reinvent the online real estate experience from the top down, Kulkarni says Nestfully plans to change the conversation at a philosophical level, asking what both consumers and agents want from an online home marketplace.
“We want to give people just information about the property search, and contact information from the folks they want to get answers from,” he explains. “We want to reach those folks who are really in it.”
Nestfully today, Nestfully tomorrow
According to Kulkarni, a huge priority for the team behind Nestfully (which was developed on the tech side by Constellation1) was to “execute quickly,” and put out features into the market for people to use and explore, knowing that “there is no such thing as perfect in tech.”
Donnellan previously told RISMedia that the team was “not trying to boil the ocean” at launch, but in line with the platform’s core mission, leverage user feedback to craft further features and improvements.
RISMedia took an exclusive tour of Nestfully in preview version this week, scrolling some of the launch capabilities.
On day one, Nestfully appears to offer a sleek, modern and intuitive interface, with a few nifty new wrinkles—for instance, a search autofill function that can direct consumers not just to towns and cities, but offers inclusive recommendations for neighborhoods, subdivisions or even school districts (some, but not all other competing portals have similar functionality).
Another big tweak especially exciting for real estate professionals shows up in the structure of the listing page. While sites like Zillow and Redfin usually put listing agent information in plain text somewhere in the corner or lower down on the listing, often shunted aside by prominent links to their own lead capture forms or in-house services, on Nestfully, the listing agent is displayed bright, bold and at the top, using headshots when possible.
Kulkarni calls that a “very deliberate decision,” again, as part of Nestfully’s goal of empowering that fundamental dynamic of a real estate transaction—filtering out what Donnellan previously characterized as “noise” created by companies trying to integrate or monetize every possible service within the same interaction or platform, and connecting consumers with agents.
“Let’s build something, let’s make sure it’s good and satisfies what consumers are looking for and make sure it delivers unbiased information. And then let’s get down to work and start understanding what to build next—build that stuff quickly, learn and iterate,” Kulkarni says.
Millman pointed out that once consumers “are ready to take action” on a real estate transaction after browsing online, the first thing they look for is an agent. Finding more insights like this through live usage of the platform is how Nestfully will evolve, he says.
“During the initial launch phase, Nestfully will use data and real usage patterns—along with user feedback—to maintain a cycle of updates and enhancements based on real data and intelligence to deliver the best tool that consumers and pros want to use together,” promises Millman.
Some of those updates are not all that far off, as with Kulkarni saying there exists an extensive roadmap to iterate on the core promise of the platform.
For instance, Nestfully currently uses an automated valuation model (AVM) provided by ATTOM Data Solutions to show property values. But Constellation1 is working on a “very custom” AVM for the platform that aims to be more transparent, attempting to create a more holistic way to leverage the power of the tool, which Kulkarni says is a huge priority following launch.
“We want to make sure consumers understand why their property is getting valued by the AVM the way it is—and then give them the opportunity to connect with a local agent who knows the market best,” Kulkarni says. “The AVM provides the science part—the algorithm, the data crunching. But there’s always an art (to property valuation).”
Another innovation, somewhat further off, is a push to more directly facilitate conversations between real estate professionals and consumers browsing the portal. What exactly that will look like remains to be seen, but Kulkarni highlights that as another place where Nestfully thinks they can provide a different level of service—connecting consumers to the people who will ultimately be their main source of guidance and expertise in their real estate journey.
“It’s on the product roadmap, we’re still scoping and discussing as a team,” he says. “The teaser here is, that is front and center of what we want.”
In the crowded consumer space, against the backdrop of a real estate market that has grown increasingly competitive across the spectrum of tech, finance and ancillary services, Nestfully is explicitly betting that building off of real estate fundamentals has the power to make a real mark on the industry.
“We’re 20 years into a sort of technological revolution in real estate, all the billions and billions of dollars poured into digital real estate—yet most people still work ‘the traditional way’ with their agents,” Kulkarni says. “What we’re trying to do is understand those concepts, what do people love about working with their agent—because they do. We want to take those concepts and see how we can make them more efficient.”
Check out the new portal here: https://www.nestfully.com/.
