Innovation: The Heart of SentriLock

The Importance of innovation to SentriLock can’t be understated. It’s at the heart of everything we do. Over the last 18 years, we’ve never stopped innovating in our product approach. Each new generation of product – both software and hardware – brings with it various enhancements and new capabilities.

Our SentriKey Showing Service® arrived on the market 24 months ago.  Our focus was on an integrated showing platform and lockbox solution that was not yet available elsewhere in the industry.  Since our launch our competition has implemented similar products and are in various stages of catch-up.

One area in which we continue to stand out in the industry is our belief that it is important that the entire ecosystem of products and services at SentriLock cooperate in harmony with one another. Other companies have tried to produce a mashup of systems, sometimes marrying together two disparate products built without regard for one another, or one company acquiring another for the purpose of tying their products together. The result of that manner of product development will always be a time-consuming challenge fraught with functionality issues.

Building products that work together from the ground up, as we do at SentriLock, results in more seamless connectivity, an improved agent experience, and the ability to build complementary services atop this foundation later down the road. You can innovate faster on a platform that you’ve built from scratch. You can bring products to market faster. You can deliver better experiences for customers. When technologies don’t match up, you’re always playing catchup. It’s also easy to ideate on a platform that’s designed from the ground up to work with the tools and technologies that will actually be used in tandem alongside it.

For decades, there was very little desire to produce a long-lasting, durable lockbox that could be modified.  Manufacturers wanted REALTORS® to purchase a new product every few years just like you would a smartphone. SentriLock has long held a different approach. By extending the lifespan of real estate technology tools produced under our name, we allow customers to sometimes skip out on an entire generation or two of competitor products. These savings can be an investment for when a true technological leap comes along that actually warrants an upgrade.

There are 15 year old SentriLock lockboxes still out in the field today that are still functional, and can even rival some of the products produced by our competitors today. Do these lockboxes have all of the same features that our latest and greatest do? Of course not. But an agent’s investment in SentriLock lockboxes has always provided longer lasting, greater value that can be built upon when you are ready to upgrade to the latest generation’s offerings.

SentriLock supports two, or even three generations of products out in the field simultaneously, saving agents critical capital. Older, legacy hardware is granted a longer lifespan by the very fact of it sharing a foundational integrated platform with the latest tools we produce. In short, there’s a continuity among all of SentriLock’s generations of products.

Software can and will change more rapidly than hardware. But technologically speaking, what these lockboxes can do will evolve at a much faster rate than their shells. When Bluetooth® functionality was added to the previous generation of lockboxes, they still looked identical to the previous iteration without the electronic connectivity technology. Mechanically, SentriGuard lockboxes will likely look the same for the next decade, even as new functionality is added, and the devices gain new abilities made possible by software upgrades.

All of this is made possible when the entire product line is built from a shared foundation, with the intention of a seamless experience across devices. The coming years will see no shortage of mergers and acquisitions in the real estate technology space, but companies attempting to Frankenstein their way to the cohesion that SentriLock has produced will always come up short.

About the Author:

Scott Fisher is the CEO and Founder of SentriLock, LLC, a subsidiary and Official Lockbox Solution for the National Association of REALTORS®. As an innovator with 30 years developing and delivering technology solutions in the real estate industry, Scott has 24 U.S. and foreign patents to his credit, and is the catalyst for technology development for SentriLock.