Acre grows user base 580% since embedding scheduling with the Nylas Calendar API

By integrating Nylas’ Calendar API into its platform, Acre empowers brokers to schedule mortgage appointments 60x faster.

Acre is an all-in-one mortgage and protection platform for brokers and advisors aimed at making home buying quicker and easier for buyers, insurers, and lenders by bringing everything together in one place. The company’s mission is to revolutionize the process of buying property – making owning a home faster, easier, more transparent, and ultimately cheaper for consumers.

Utilizing innovative blockchain technology, Acre’s broker platform puts detailed consumer and property data at the heart of obtaining a mortgage or protection coverage. The system is a one-stop shop for brokers, granting them more time to focus on client needs and deliver better outcomes with fewer delays.

In fact, Acre’s proprietary technology supports mortgage journeys in their entirety – from CRM, lead capture, and sourcing to fact-finding, recommendation, and application. This experience saves brokers both time and money while promoting better compliance practices.

Challenges:

Roughly 86% of the mortgage market conducted in the UK is through intermediaries. This means most prospective home buyers have to use brokers for key steps throughout the home buying process, including scheduling home viewings. 

Initially, Acre’s platform did not offer any calendar integrations. Instead, end users would have to schedule time with customers outside of Acre’s platform. This workflow led to organizational inefficiency, introduced unnecessary friction, and established a poor user experience. For example, prospective buyers would resort to calling brokers to confirm availability, since they couldn’t view their calendars to see when they were free. Meanwhile, brokers would have to switch between applications to book meetings because their work calendars couldn’t integrate with Acre’s platform.

“We had quite a few clients and prospective clients who, when we talked to them, said one of their major pain points was keeping their calendars in sync with each other and for their users to have access to each others’ calendars. What our brokers really wanted was for our platform to see their own calendars and understand when they have free capacity to deal with tasks, book appointments in, and to see other people in their team’s capacity,” said Sam Leonard-Williams, Head of Product at Acre.

Solution:

The team at Acre considered other platforms and even building a solution in-house by themselves, but they ultimately settled on the Nylas Calendar API to solve their calendar integration problems. That’s because Nylas was the only solution that offered everything they needed in one place, including:

• A faster, easier, and more scalable solution than building one in-house
• Greater customization and control than other third-party SaaS tools
• Simple and flexible pricing that scales with Acre’s growing user base 

With the Nylas Calendar API, Acre built a calendar integration solution in just six weeks that would’ve taken two of their own developers upwards of three months to achieve. “It was really apparent that it was going to be a massive time saving to use Nylas. It was far, far quicker and far, far cheaper for us to use [Nylas],” Leonard-Williams said. 

Acre’s implementation was quick and straightforward thanks to easy-to-use documentation, a seamless onboarding process, and a reliable customer support team. “We got all the support we needed. Whatever we needed help with, [Nylas] was more than happy to set up calls and answer questions. We found the documentation to be clear and useful…certainly one of the easier third-party implementations that we’ve done,” added Leonard-Williams.

Results:

Since launching calendar integrations and scheduling functionality, nearly half of Acre’s current users have integrated their calendars into the platform. The company plans to expand to other calendar providers in the near future to achieve 100% integration with the goal of booking over 1,000 new mortgage appointments for Acre brokers before the end of 2022. By reducing the time it takes to schedule customer appointments from five minutes to a matter of seconds, this new feature enables brokers and other intermediaries to engage clients faster, develop stronger customer relationships, and connect more clients with the right mortgage.

Acre’s user base has increased 580% since the launch of its scheduling app and will continue to grow as more brokers and advisors experience the benefits of an end-to-end mortgage platform. The company is also gearing up to integrate the Nylas Email API into its product roadmap in the near future to better enable intermediaries to effectively communicate and collaborate with their clients going forward.

“[Nylas] essentially does all we want in a single solution. It’s flexible enough for us to design a user experience tailored to our needs, but also easy enough to leverage out-of-the-box SDKs to start testing demand for these features as quickly as possible,” Leonard-Williams concluded.