Mike Harvey says he walked away from earning $500,000 a year as a real estate salesman in Nelson because he realised there were major problems with the way the industry operated. 

It was 2018, and his infant daughter was seriously unwell in hospital in Christchurch. 

“I was trying to run a real estate business, you know, we had a really successful real estate business. I had my one-and-a-half-year-old in Ronald McDonald house… I’m flying back to Nelson to do open homes in the weekend. 

“And I’m like ‘I’m over this’. So I fly back to Nelson, and I get to a street called George St. I pull into George St and there’s two new signs up around the house [that he had listed for sale]. Now, all the houses are the same. They’re all built in 1960s… it’s just how well they’ve been looked after… but there’s no difference really. 

“I saw that there’s been $1000 spent on each sign, so that’s $3000 on signs. There’s $3000 on full pages in the paper, then there’s the internet, $1000 each… There’s probably $10,000 spent in that street to attract buyers. 

“And 11 buyers came and they went to all three properties. No one else came. And I sat there and I thought ‘you know what? What a waste of freaking money’… that was 2018 and everything was just selling so we got multiple offers, and [all three] properties on the street sold.” 

The next week, someone else with a house on the street rang and said she was looking to sell. 

“I said, ‘I’ll be honest with you, my daughter’s really unwell, I don’t want the opposition to get money from you, it just builds their business. 

“So what I’m going to do, if it’s okay with you, is, I’ll just send you the open home register from last week. It’s got, you know, 11 people who came to that street. There was $10,000 with the marketing. Three of them are purchased… I’ll send you the other eight.” 

After checking the buyers did not mind, he sent their details. 

“She came back to me a week later and said, I sold it to one of them.” 

He said from that point it became hard to take money for advertising from vendors knowing that their likely buyer was probably already on a list of people who had been to a recent open home. 

That led to the development of Yelsa Connect, a platform that matches buyers and sellers. 

“We’ve created a marketplace for people that own homes to browse buyers, so they can bring more qualified buyers. 

“They don’t have to do all of that expensive marketing, which actually just feeds into the real estate agent’s profile. 

“I was a real estate agent for 20 years, and, you know, very, very successful, actually… I left a half-million dollar income or something like that, to build this, because I saw it’s the future, direct connections. 

“Every vendor is not looking for open homes. Every vendor is not looking for photographs or signboards or any of those things. Every vendor is just looking for a buyer.” 

Vendors can use the platform to find buyers who are looking for their type of property and then engage a real estate salesperson listed with Yelsa to connect the deal. 

“You see you got five buyers … you go to the agent directory, and you invite me, and you might invite three other agents, and we all come around to your house and do an appraisal, just like normal, and we tell you what our prices are, and we tell you whatever we do, and we say, like, if we don’t sell to these buyers, we’ll list it and do this and that next thing. To unlock the buyers, you have to choose one of those agents and sign the listing authority with them, because then they’re legally representing you. 

“We’ve got agents now that are running matches in Auckland and getting matches of buyers before they advertise their property. We’ve actually had sales…This is the future of real estate globally.” 

For buyers, it meant suitable listings were delivered to them and they did not miss out on a house that would be a good fit, he said. 

Agents pay $99 a month to be listed on the site. When a deal happens there is a $1000 success fee, of which $750 goes to the mortgage broker who supplied the buyers to the site. Another $100 goes to the Heart Foundation and $159 to Yelsa. 

Harvey has been working on the idea for five years but got a boost when Squirrel Mortgages took an interest - and a share in the business - and started to offer its preapproved borrowers the option of being listed on the platform. 

There are currently about 100 preapproved buyers on the site. 

“It’s really starting to feel like it’s really getting some wheels. You know, it needs to. My wife really struggled. Five years of me not working. When [Squirrel founder] John Bolton put his first buyers on last week. She just sat there and cried for about two hours, just in relief, because we just threw everything at it, you know.” 

The Real Estate Institute said it would not comment on individual platforms. 

-Susan Edmunds, RNZ