Showami is software that facilitates the broadcast, acceptance and payment of showing needs between licensed agents, offering teams and brokerages a quick way to create a showing delegation system.

Are you receiving Inman’s Agent Edge? Make sure you’re subscribed for the latest on real estate technology from Inman’s expert Craig Rowe.

Showami is an app for outsourcing home showings to other qualified agents.

Platforms: Browser; mobile app on iOS, Android
Ideal for: Brokerages, teams, agents and marketing managers

Top selling points:

• National coverage
• Good tool for new agents
• Flexible brokerage/team options
• Negotiable payment options
• Central custom dashboard

Top concern:

Showami is the latest in a series of recent apps that helps agents assign showings to other agents. While it does have a brokerage focus, it’s facing some adoption headwinds as a result.

What you should know

Showami is software that facilitates the broadcast, acceptance and payment of showing needs between licensed agents, offering teams and brokerages a quick way to create a showing delegation system. It can be used in a browser and on both major mobile operating systems.

There’s nothing overly groundbreaking here, which is actually a good thing. Business processes should be under constant scrutiny for improvement, which typically means finding ways to make them more manageable. That’s where software comes in. Showami gives agents a central source for posting and responding to showing needs, a common industry practice. That alone makes it an app worth considering.

Although many brokerages may have a standard practice in place for handling the outsourcing of showings, it’s typically manual and unstructured. Maybe there’s a bulletin board of some sort or available agent dashboard, which is something Showami offers its administrators.

Agent activity can be tracked, from who’s assigning to who’s accepting. It’s a capability that would likely be most often accessed by team admins, and I’d like to know how it integrates with a larger CRM or business activity solution that also monitors showing volume, especially as they relate to market activity and keeping sellers in the loop on how their home is performing.

Thus, could this app disintermediate how showings are tracked? Maybe. That’s something users will need to reconcile.

Setting up an account comes down to inputting name, license and brokerage information. Agents can identify as a buyer rep, listing agent or both, and the app is bifurcated accordingly.

Agents needing to get a showing down can broadcast the need to trigger a 20-minute response window. If it’s not accepted, it’s delayed for 3 minutes and sent again.

Brokers can have an open or closed portal, meaning requests can be limited to only those in their brokerage, while an open portal gives in-house agents 10 minutes to respond before being sent to Showami users outside the brokerage.

There are fields for entering lockbox details, the buyers’ information and an important field that asks if the agent knows the buyer. This can’t be taken seriously enough, as security threats are a real thing.

I’d like to see the app connect to some form of third-party verification or expand on this issue itself. A few hurried notes may not be enough to make an agent feel safe to show a home to a stranger.

There are public and private notes fields that can help the assigning party further detail what the buyer is looking for, their budget, etc., which I imagine a CRM could share, too.

Those looking to show a home can propose a new time, confirm or cancel, and have accepted showings get automatic placement on their calendars. The push notification system keeps everyone up to date on what’s happening.

Overall, the front-end design does what it should, keeping everyone easily informed and offering quick access to the core functions in both mobile and desktop environments.

I’d like to see a couple of holes filled as Showami matures: The buyer information/security issue being one, and the other being buyer and seller communication.

Showami tries to address both with some best practices advice on its website, but that’s not how its primary user is engaged with the product — it’s through the app. It feels like an afterthought.

Their blog, too, attempts to address these issues, but I’m not sure how Showami will get eyeballs on it or properly position it as a central source of industry education. Brokerages provide tons of this content for their agents, and the industry already has endless sources.

In the end, I think the consumer deserves to know who will be showing them a property, too. Let’s find a way to bring them and the seller into the fold through alerts and outreach and let them decide if they want to work with that agent.

Showami will be expanding into using its tools for inspections, walk-throughs, photography appointments and other common listing tasks that require visiting a property.

The app does what it promises, which is to help busy agents delegate and other agents make a little extra money.

But, it can, or rather, should, do more than that.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.