‘Selling Sunset’ star Christine Quinn’s brokerage debuts new crypto credit scoring platform – TechCrunch

For fans of both reality TV and web3 (hopefully that group includes more than just this reporter), Christine Quinn’s move was to leave the Oppenheim Group and found a brokerage with her husband to serve the crypto rich. Now, RealOpen CMO Quinn and CEO Christian Dumontet, who married Quinn in a swan-filled soiree on Selling Sunset season three, have finally shared some long-awaited juicy details about the company’s product roadmap (!!!).

The pair sat down for an exclusive interview with TechCrunch to discuss RealOpen’s latest product, RealScore, a crypto-credit scoring system for buyers and sellers of luxury real estate. Their brokerage primarily serves high net worth clients looking to purchase real estate using cryptocurrency. The RealScore software they have developed acts as a tool for both parties in a transaction to assess the strength of an offer, taking into account the mix of tokens used in the offer and trying to predict their volatility, according to Dumontet, who previously founded and bootstrapped Foodler and sold it to Grubhub for over $50 million in 2017.

Before we got into how RealScore works, Quinn explained why a client would want to buy a house using crypto instead of cash in the first place. Crypto “whales” who have a significant portion of their wealth in digital currency prefer to move quickly in business, and real estate purchases are no exception, Quinn said.

RealOpen co-founders Christine Quinn and Christian Dumontet Image credit: Photo by Gotham/GC Images)

“I find a lot of clients who actually want to close quickly because of the volatility [of crypto],” she said. “Because of that, we can pick the day, down to the minute, they’ll do it. We live in a generation of instant gratification where people want things fast. With a traditional mortgage, you’re looking at a four-week closing time, or it can be longer sometimes [due to] inspection preparedness.”

Some of Quinn’s clients value speed so much that it’s okay to just see a property over FaceTime before agreeing to move forward with a deal, she said.

“I’ve seen people say I’m good with emergency preparedness, I don’t care if it’s termites or if I have to fix the chimney,” Quinn added.

Buyers pay RealOpen’s sellers in cash, meaning they must convert their crypto to dollars before completing a transaction, Dumontet explained. But they usually can’t wait until the last minute to liquidate their money, because sellers need to be able to assess the buyer’s ability to pay before accepting the transaction, which can be complicated if the buyer has crypto at the time of bidding. For the buyer, converting crypto to cash triggers a taxable event that “cannot be undone,” Dumontet explained.

“The process of buying a home can take months if they are looking at different properties. If it is one of the more particular buyers, they have lost participation in the crypto market. They may have a surplus of cash because they want to buy a property at price X, but they want a buffer over that because they’re not quite sure what the property prices are and what the seller will accept, he said.

This is where RealScore comes in – it’s essentially the software engine that powers RealOpen’s brokerage. Using RealScore, buyers can delay converting crypto to cash until the moment the transaction closes without having to explain to a seller the value of their offer in advance, according to Dumontet.

The platform allows buyers and sellers to see algorithmic predictions about the likelihood of price movement across the various cryptoassets involved in a transaction based on historical data, Dumontet explained. The RealScore for an offer is calculated using correlation coefficients that illustrate how different types of digital currencies are related, helping a buyer decide whether to diversify the mix of assets that make up their offer and when to formally extend one, he said.

Ultimately, this allows both parties to come to a common understanding of an offer, which often results in a faster transaction process, Quinn added, noting that RealOpen can complete “Know Your Customer” (KYC) diligence on a customer within minutes and close a transaction in a single day. RealScore’s analytics could also be a useful tool for Quinn and Dumontet to use to motivate buyers who were already considering a specific property to take the leap.

A mock-up of RealScore’s crypto credit scoring platform Image credit: RealScore

“It gives us an opportunity to go to our customers and say, hey, actually, right now is a really good time if you want to do that transaction. So it also helps us so that we have a universal language between our customers, Quinn said.

Quinn said the RealOpen platform has $150 million worth of exclusive listings, primarily in Miami, which has emerged as a cryptocurrency hub. Outside of Miami, Quinn said, RealOpen’s crypto focus has attracted a strong pipeline of listings from sellers around the world.

Brokerage contracts with a network of ~50 local agents licensed in each jurisdiction, Dumontet added. The company employs three full-time engineers and has a four-person management team including the co-founders, he said.

While RealOpen’s main focus is on buyers in the crypto world, the RealScore platform can also help both parties evaluate offers with cash. Since the company officially launched in April 2022, it has closed just under a dozen transactions for its clients, Quinn said, although she did not share details on how many of those deals included crypto.

RealOpen says it can facilitate transactions in all cryptocurrencies, although Dumontet noted that bitcoin, ethereum and stablecoins are the most popular choices among buyers. Both Quinn and Dumontet, who was an early adopter of crypto in 2013 when Foodler began accepting payments in Bitcoin, said they are confident the asset class is here to stay.

Next up on RealOpen’s product roadmap are features tailored for people looking to buy investment properties using crypto, not just homes they want to occupy themselves, Dumontet said.

“If you look at the traditional [real estate platforms such as] Zillow and Redfin, the user interface is the same. You enter parameters, price range, geography, bedrooms, bathrooms, house type, and then you see the list and go from there … But when you think about diversification of assets, real estate is an excellent investment. It has leverage, and interest rate arbitrage, that you don’t see in other types of assets,” he added.

Quinn, meanwhile, hinted at even bigger long-term ambitions for RealOpen, saying she hopes to eventually diversify beyond real estate and bridge digital assets with all kinds of physical goods.

“One of my friends is actually a diamond dealer. She was the one who designed my ring and she said, ‘a lot of my clients have tons of cryptocurrency and they would love to buy diamonds for their wife, how can I do this?’ And I said, well, the process is exactly the same, as it is for people who want to buy cars and things like that,” Quinn said.

All eyes will certainly be on Quinn as she continues to build the venture that drew her away from the TV series and the brokerage that brought her massive fame, but in her usual style, she seems confident she’s up for the challenge.

“I think the Oppenheim Group will not exist in seven years. It can only scale for so long. Sotheby’s, Berkshire Hathaway, I think they will be around forever, but I think boutique brokers will be a thing of the past. So for me it was just about getting ahead of the curve,” Quinn said of starting the RealOpen.