Real estate execs launch Klipster for securing a home

Buying or renting an apartment without ever lining up for an open house, stepping foot inside or shaking hands with a realtor used to be a daring novelty.

It’s hardly worth commenting on today. Ask any one of the roughly 126,000 licensed real estate pros that work in New York City and they’ll tell you: Young people buy, rent and tour properties over their phones.

And so, Klipster was born. Launching today, the app seeks to become the listings platform du jour for the phone-obsessed era.

“Over the last few years, tracking all the data, we started noticing a trend,” said Eric Benaim, CEO of Long Island City-based brokerage Modern Spaces. “People were making appointments over FaceTime, and they were actually doing transactions that way.”

That wasn’t completely unheard of. Those moving to New York from out of state and others, with arsenals of cash and a deep knowledge of a local market, sometimes operated that way. Benaim points to Sylvester Stallone, who last year signed a contract and paid a hefty deposit to buy a $24.95 million East Hampton mansion — all over FaceTime. He didn’t tour the home until it was time to close.

Yet suddenly, neighborhood transplants from within the city were shunning open houses, favoring an impersonal approach. What changed was the proliferation of online rental platforms like Airbnb, said Benaim, which have normalized the idea of renting based on photos alone.

Still, something else in the research surprised Benaim: The leads for these digital deals weren’t coming from the last generation of internet listing platforms that now dominate the market, like Zillow and Trulia. They were coming from social media, practicularly from Instagram and TikTok. He realized he needed to refocus his business.

“Now, 75% of all home shoppers are millennials and Gen Z,” he said.

“Where do they spend most of their time? They spend it on their phones, on social media, whether it’s Tiktok [or] Instagram. And they’re consuming video content.”

The searchable app allows users to filter content to their needs and price points, whether they want to buy a West Village townhouse mansion or rent a Bed-Stuy two-bedroom.

But instead of static listing photos, the app uses AI to automatically generate highly consumable video “walkthroughs,” while giving brokers a platform to post their own short-form, real estate-centric video content. Klipster will also allow for livestream video tours, video calls with brokers and even the ability to transact all within the app. Their motto: “swipe, scroll, apply.”

Its founders, Benaim and Modern Spaces marketing exec Arlinda Dine, believe that their addictive app will have you flicking through real estate videos late on Sunday nights when you should be sleeping.

“We saw that a lot of our agents were showing apartments using FaceTime video, but it was just a one-on-one,” said Dine. “As we were developing this idea, we thought about creating a method where an agent can host a live open house, or just record an open house and post it, and have maybe hundreds of thousands of people watch it.”

Klipster has been spun off as an independent company, with Michael Taus, the serial tech founder behind Rent.com, as its Chief Growth Officer. What’s more, they are in the process of scraping every listing in the city, animating its listing photos into scrollable video content and hosting them on their app. They’re actively recruiting and inviting brokers from every agency in the city to sign up and post — as well as tapping established social media influencers like JulioJanPierre, who has 1.5 million followers on Instagram.

Now, imagine a Brown Harris Stevens broker marketing a five-story Gilded Age townhouse oozing sophisticated spender on the Upper East Side. Surely, they have no business dabbing, dancing, or, whatever it is the kids do now, for views. Well, Klipster hopes to lure them, too.

“Agents like Ryan Serhant, or somebody like that, obviously know how to create content and it’s very natural for them,” said Benaim. “But there are also agents who it’s probably not natural for — so we’ve created AI tools to assist them with that.”

Use those tools and you’ll reach five times as many clients and close transactions up to 30% faster, they claim.

With today’s launch, the app will curate real estate clips in NYC, the New Jersey metro, and South Florida markets — with “a rapid nationwide rollout” to follow. For anyone already addicted to real estate porn, no matter your chosen site, this TikTok-meets-Zillow-meets-Facetime hybrid is probably just the dopamine-punching time-suck you’ve been waiting for.

“If you are on social media, you already have real estate professionals popping up in your feeds, because over the last few years agents have become creators.” said Benaim. “But a platform like that for real estate has never really existed, until now.”