The Story Behind SentriKey Showing Service®

This 18-month period for SentriLock has been one of the most dynamic since the company’s founding 18 years ago, with two product redesigns under our belt and two industry-changing product launches on the near horizon. Devin Beck, SentriLock Director of Revenue, shares one of the company’s newest innovation for real estate professionals: SentriKey Showing Service®.

Our users have seen a complete redesign of our SentriKey® Real Estate system. In the next few weeks, we’ll release a ground-up rebuild of the SentriConnect® platform that enables agents to grant secure, temporary access to out-of-area agents and others who have a need for controlled access to a property. This release is based on an expanded feature set and streamlined registration process. And, we’ve been busy on the hardware side, designing and testing more than a dozen features and capabilities that will change your world from a lockbox perspective.

Finally, coming soon, we’ll release SentriLock’s optional, subscription-based offering available for purchase by real estate associations and MLSs: SentriKey Showing Service®, combined solution for managing showings, client communication, and property access. This announcement, in particular, has generated a lot of excitement and interest from our users over the past few months.

I want to take this opportunity in this, our inaugural blog, to share why we’re building SentriKey Showing Service®, highlight some of its unique differentiators, and detail why we believe we’re ideally positioned to provide this highly innovative solution at a price point currently not seen in this space.

Why SentriLock Is Entering the Showing Service Space

We’re entering this space primarily because YOU, our users, have asked us to. Prior to development, and in the months since we announced our intentions, more than 100 associations representing more than 200,000 agents have expressed their interest in this service.

This aligns with SentriLock’s primary mission: to provide value-added technology services at a competitive price on behalf of the real estate community. SentriLock was founded specifically to address a monopoly in the lockbox market held by Supra. With ShowingTime’s purchase of CSS in Fall 2019, we saw another market with almost a 100 percent monopoly in the space.

As a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of REALTORS®, SentriLock doesn’t aggressively sell its solutions or seek opportunistic revenue streams. Given that one vendor currently controls the showing service marketplace, we believed this would limit investment in future research and development, potentially lead to substandard customer service, and leave no counterbalance to future price increases. While we fully believe in what we’re building and that many users will adopt the service, we’ll be absolutely satisfied if our efforts primarily elevate the quality of services available to all associations and help continue to provide this service at the lowest possible rate.

Pairing a Showing Service With Lockbox Access Management

SentriKey Showing Service® pairs well with our existing offering of lockbox access management. We’ve controlled property access for 18 years and, over that time, we’ve received numerous requests – largely from those migrating from mechanical lockboxes – to increase the overall security of electronic lockboxes by enabling a feature called Access By Appointment.

As named, this feature only permits access to a credentialed user if they have a confirmed appointment for that day and time; however, by offering a showing service to request and confirm appointments, we can provide an end-to-end solution to manage access securely and limit that access to scheduled authorized users – all within one platform.

We believe that the most dynamic change in this space for an innovative new solution can come from a company with tremendous experience working specifically in the real estate market. The primary players in the showing service market are strapped by the same issue: a large, complex system built over many years of progressive development that’s unwieldy to update. It’s challenging to leverage new, advanced technologies like AI on a legacy code base that’s not always written to modern standards.

In the past 5 years, some very interesting offerings attempted to break into this space; however, they struggled with the same issues many technology startups experience when entering a market that’s controlled primarily by a few established companies. With every new client requiring a migration from an existing provider, the lack of “greenfield” opportunities scares away venture capital and private equity funding that can carry them through those first years of potentially limited revenue.

SentriLock’s large user base, primary self-sustaining business operations, and proven track record of providing state-of-the-art technology solutions overcomes the hurdles deterring other companies from making the same attempt.

I hope you can tell we’re very excited about this upcoming release, and we hope you are, too. Demos of SentriKey Showing Service® will be available beginning the first week of August, and the service will be available for purchase soon.

Associations: Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about how SentriKey Showing Service® can benefit you and your association members, contact me at showingservice@sentrilock.com.