When software engineer James Rogers and his wife were looking to buy a home in New Hampshire's White Mountains, they turned, like any homebuyer would, to a realtor. Rogers poked around on Zillow and found a house he liked. He and his wife arranged with the realtor—we'll call him Dan, which is not his real name—to meet at the property, about a two-hour drive north of Boston. But when the time came, Dan was not there.
"He was like, 'My dog threw up in my car, I got lost—just go in without me,'" Rogers recalled.
So they did. They took a tour of the place. They liked it. Then, Rogers and his wife ended up seeing themselves through essentially every part of the purchasing process.
"He didn't help at all. We did everything," Rogers said. "We ended up not closing on time, because [Dan] had dropped the ball again. Like, he wasn't even talking to the sellers."
The realtor troubles didn't end there. In Boston, utilities companies will often offer movers a grace period of a few days to set up and turn on their water, electricity and heat. In New Hampshire, as Rogers would discover, that was not the case. Their first night in the new place, he and his wife had no water (it was pumped from a well), no electricity (in the middle of winter) and no heat (they started a fire and slept on the floor beside it).
Dan, Rogers thought, should have been the one to help them avoid that.
"We were basically camping inside," Rogers said. "I was like, 'This is so dumb. This guy who got paid so much money only made my life worse.' Not to say that there aren't people who aren't good at that job, because there are people who are great at that job, but I was so mad. As a software engineer, I was like, 'This needs to be better.'"
It was only a matter of months after that experience that Rogers started working on Torii, a real estate app that promises to guide users through all the steps of home-buying through with ease. It's aimed at Millennials, like Rogers, who have the cash to purchase a home but are new to the process.
In practice, Torii is almost like Tinder for houses. To view properties in the app, you can literally swipe right or left to indicate yea or nay.
The app also serves as a platform for all documents, the functionality to make an offer and real-time updates on outstanding offers.
"Because Torii is more efficient than the typical real estate agency," reads a press release shared with BostInno, "Torii pays for its buyers’ closing costs, an average of $6,132 per purchase in 2019. Torii also gives home buyers more visibility into the home purchase process, creating a streamlined experience that has earned Torii only five-star reviews thus far."
All of this has earned Torii the ability to close on its own offer of sorts: a $1.4 million seed round, its first official funding in the two years since its inception.
With the money, Torii plans to build out its engineering team and expand its real estate offerings. There are currently just five people working full-time at the moment, including Rogers and his co-founder, Zach Gorman, in San Francisco and three people in Boston. Torii is officially based here in Beantown and currently only features properties in the area, but Rogers hopes he can launch in a few more markets over the next year.
Already, dozens of Torii users have closed on homes, with more offers currently underway. One of those users is Chris Stephens, a 26-year-old data quality engineer who works for the City of Boston. He closed on a home about two months ago after working with Torii's real estate agent, Mike Sokolowski, and he moved in about a week and a half after close.
"The big selling point, honestly, what made it reasonable was the fact that they reimburse the closing costs," Stephens said. "It allows people like me—you know, Millennials who are not rolling in the dough and who have not profited from the economy as much as some of the older generations—to actually get into the homebuyer market."
Stephens added that Sokolowski was available to answer questions at the drop of the hat, a detail that was also noted by Jeff Seals, another Torii client. Seals, a 33-year-old software architect, closed on his home in late June.
"From the top down, from Zach to Mike and everyone else we corresponded with on the core team, they were incredibly helpful and personable," Seals said. "It was great to have someone else doing the heavy lifting and managing the relationships behind closed doors. We could really focus on finding our home, and not just on finding our house."
