Beyond Redfin: Zown bets on AI, salaried agents and buyer rebates

When Rishard Rameez, co-founder and CEO of Canadian-based real estate brokerage Zown, bought and sold a home within the same year, the inefficiencies of the process left him frustrated. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I had to pay [almost] all of my down payment towards covering the real estate agent’s fees, which didn’t really make sense when it took me years to save that money.”

He vented about his experience on Reddit. “I went to bed, and I woke up to see that my simple Reddit post had gotten over one million people reading it, and 95% of the people who read it actually upvoted the post. Everyone had their own experiences to share. And a lot of people messaged me,” he says. 

The reaction convinced him that the issue was larger than just one transaction, but he wanted to be sure. So, the next day, he wrote a comment saying, “Hey, if this gets enough upvotes, I’ll quit what I’m doing right now and start working on building a solution. And, within a couple of hours, that post had about 5,000 upvotes. So I was like, okay, I’m doing this.”

Breaking down the agent role

Zown’s model aims to overhaul the way real estate agents work by introducing AI and specialization. “Most of the time that a Realtor spends is actually on lead generation, lead nurturing, cold calling, knocking on doors… rather than negotiating or getting deals done.”

So, he says, Zown divides the agent role into separate functions. “One is, when it comes to educating the buyer about the market… Then you have an agent who actually shows you properties. Then, they negotiate and get the deal done,” Rameez says. “We have two sets of agents,” he says. Zown divides them into showing agents and personal agents. 

Showing agents earn hourly pay. “That agent gets paid roughly $50 per hour for their work, and each showing roughly takes about an hour. So now if I’m going to see 10 properties before I find my dream home, there is roughly $500 that gets spent on showing agents,” Rishard explains. Personal agents are salaried, with additional compensation for closings.

Lisa Touney, Zown’s first U.S. broker, adds that this compensation model helps reduce stress for agents. “It takes away that chaos. It provides peace of mind. Since they’re salaried, instead of having the commissions that are staggered and not consistent, they are consistently paid, so they’re more at ease in working with clients.”

AI and the consumer experience

Technology is at the core of Zown’s offering. “Zown has the technology side down to a T,” says Tourney. “We wanted to be ahead of it. We wanted to be introducing it.”

Rameez introduced AI to automate a lot of the processes involved in buying a home to “reduce the inefficiency that we see today.” He adds, “That empowers agents to do what they’re good at — negotiating and getting deals done.

“When we did that, we were surprised that we were able to shave off a lot of time that real estate agents spend, allowing us to give back to the buyer. Today, we give back almost 50% of our commissions to buyers to help them with their home purchase and reduce their closing costs,” he says. “Roughly, that is about 1.5% of the purchase price.”

Rameez compared Zown’s structure to a production line. “What we’ve done instead is essentially treated this like a production line, like how an iPhone is made. No matter how many iPhones are being made, you’re buying the same iPhone anywhere. We’ve divided what a [real estate agent] does into multiple small buckets… and we built tech and AI to automate things in each of these microservices.”

A tweak to the Redfin model

If this sounds like a model similar to Redfin, that’s because it is. Rameez directly compared Zown’s model to Redfin, pointing out what he sees as a key difference: “Redfin, and companies like Zillow, on the outside look similar. But then, if you look at Redfin, they get a lead and pass it on to a [real estate agent]. If that [agent] is not performing well, that lead might not actually have the best experience.” 

He continues, “We’ve made these individuals [experts] at these individual tasks. Zown has been able to ace that innovation and the technology behind it that Redfin or Zillow will never be able to do.”

For consumers, the experience should be seamless. Touney describes it as “more specified in a skill set and then able to provide that service fully.” She emphasized Zown’s goal: It’s about “the experience to feel like it’s a fun, involved process.”

Growth plans beyond California and Canada

Since launching its platform, Zown has completed “over $300 million worth of transactions” in California, according to Touney. Rameez says, “Our launch in California has been extremely successful so far. Now we are looking at being in every state in the U.S. within the next 12 to 16 months.”

Zown is already preparing for expansion into Texas and Florida. “We are working on launching in both Texas and Florida, which are two major real estate markets.

Touney says her focus remains on California. “We currently have four of us working. We’re working through the numbers to know that the largest market to break into right now is California, and that is going very well.”

Mission and future

Rameez sees Zown as a way to help younger buyers. “First-time homebuyers absolutely love what we are doing, and we want to help many other, younger individuals like myself to transition from renting to homeownership in their 20s rather than waiting for their 30s, 40s, or never being able to own a home.”

He adds, “We want people to start building wealth, getting into their own homes, and having that peace of mind. So our growth plan is to be the household name for first-time homebuyers.”