What is Blok?
Blok is a new real estate agency concept where the seller host the open house and Blok takes care of the marketing and legal aspects of selling the apartment. On top of this our seasoned agents are at your services through the whole sales process. By showing your home yourself you can save thousands of euros in commissions.
Our service includes:
A seasoned and licensed real estate broker
Photography and virtual viewing
Advertising of the apartment
Brochures and documents
Support during the bidding stage
Official sales contract
How it all started
Blok's story started from our own experiences in the real-estate market. In January 2015 our CEO Rudi Skogman had just found his dream apartment. To afford the new apartment he had to sell his old flat. After some price negotiations the apartment was sold and the real-estate agent cashed in a 7000 € commission. Afterwards Rudi started thinking if using an agent had been right choice after all. Did the agent really provide enough value to justify the comission charged. There had to be a better (and affordable) way to sell apartments.
In spring of 2016 Rudi got the idea of using technology to automate most of the selling process. Soon Juha, Samu and Olli joined. Things started to fall in place: What if we would let the owner arrange the viewing? What if bids could be made online? What if the home valuation would be done by an algorithm? What if the transaction cost was a bit more reasonable?
We set as our goal to create the best home selling experience in the world. By utilizing new technology we could speed up the whole process of selling your home, find the potential buyers more efficiently and keep the transaction cost at a reasonable level.
How we use technology to create a superior home selling experience?
Technology plays a key role in our service and provides the efficiency and flexibility that allows us to serve our customers efficiently. We're the first broker in Finland to have taken the entire customer journey online.
Our valuation algorithm can estimate the value of properties automatically (currently available Finland). It bases its valuations on historic transaction data of apartments that shares the characteristics (size, location, attributes).
We've also made purchasing and bidding for an apartment easier. All bids are sent using our platform that guides the buyer throughout the process of submitting a bid. Our enables anyone to make bids from anywhere, anytime of the day and bids are not restricted by the availability or schedule of the agent.
We've also built powerful tools for our human agents who's job is to ensure that our customers have a high quality experience. These tools prioritizes tasks throught the workflow of a customer case and helps processing documents and information that is not yet in machine readable format.
Today Blok is a fast growing startup that employs 22 persons. To date we have sold over 1000 apartments and helped our customers save over 8 million euros in commissions. Apart from the savings, the biggest reasons our customers choose Blok is the high quality of our service, a modern home selling platform and our experienced customer service.
