Upnest

Upnest approached iMobdev with a simple but disruptive premise: home sellers were routinely paying a flat, unquestioned commission to whichever agent they happened to meet first, with no easy way to know if that rate was fair. The idea had brand assets, a pitch, and a rough flow sketched on paper — but no app a seller could actually open and use.

The gaps were concrete. There was no way to benchmark a seller's expected commission against real local and national data before they signed with anyone. There was no anonymous intake path — sellers were expected to hand over contact details up front, before they'd seen any value, which killed trust at the first screen. And there was no side-by-side way to compare competing agent offers, so "shop around" remained a nice idea nobody could act on.

Every week without a working product meant sellers kept defaulting to the standard commission and agents kept competing on relationships instead of value — the exact dynamic Upnest was founded to break. Without a live app, Upnest also had nothing to show prospective agent partners who needed proof of real seller demand before committing to the network.

Technically, the team needed a single native app that could do double duty: educate a first-time seller (checklist, calculator) while quietly running a lead-qualification and proposal-comparison engine underneath, without either side feeling like a separate product.

Upnest launched with a complete, self-serve path from "what should I pay?" to a signed agent — commission benchmarking, anonymous intake, a guided seller checklist, and side-by-side proposal comparisons, all in one native iOS app. The anonymized intake model measurably increased how many sellers completed the request form, since it removed the upfront trust barrier of handing over a phone number to a stranger.

The transparent, itemized savings view gave Upnest a concrete number to lead with in every conversation — sellers could see their estimated dollars saved before ever talking to an agent. iMobdev continues to partner with Upnest to expand the agent directory and refine the commission-benchmarking model as more markets come online.