Real Estate 2.0 Market Leader: Homethinking.com
Here is the fifth and final installment in my Real Estate 2.0 Market Leader series. Homethinking.com is a relatively new entry into the field, but one with a very interesting business model. They promise to allow you to connect with and review agents currently selling properties in your market (unfortunately, they don’t seem to be live in Oregon quite yet).
Using their site, you can see exactly what homes an agent currently has listed (with the requisite Google mashup, of course) - more importantly you can see many of the properties an agent has just sold and exactly how much it was sold for. This is an extremely disruptive move and one that I’m not sure many are ready for yet…
In any case, here is my interview with Niki Scevak, Founder of Homethinking.com
1. What’s your elevator pitch? How would you describe your company in 50 words or less?
Homethinking helps home owners select the most exceptional realtor to sell their home with. We do that by monitoring what each agent has achieved in the past and collecting consumer reviews about the job they did.
2. What inspired you to create your site? What need did you identify that your technology could meet?
The decision to engage a realtor is becoming one of the most financially significant decisions in a consumer’s life (6% of the value of their home). At the same time, choosing one has never been harder: the number of realtors in the US has ballooned from 750,000 in 2000 to 1.2 million today.
But that’s just the numbers. We were really inspired by the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, which basically showed how the real estate industry should not have to be. By opening up objective data around the performance of each agent, and consumer reviews about the job they did, we hope that home owners wont get stuck with an Al Pacino or Jack Lemon selling their home.
3. What has been the biggest challenge getting your site off the ground?
The biggest challenge has been interacting and dealing with the real estate data we compile. Discovering and cleaning the raw data and reducing our margin of error.
Dealing with the eccentricities of different markets is a constant challenge we seek to overcome. For instance, in areas like New York, where co-op ownership is common, or places like Texas, where home sales data are not public record.
4. Real estate is generally seen as a conservative industry, what has the general reaction been to your site?
The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive (except from agents with poor reviews and results). No really. I know each interviewee will say the reaction has been positive to their service but I can honestly say that both consumers and agents have embraced the service. Consumers love the transparency and the great agents love their record being out there in an objective environment for all to see. In the end, we want to create rock stars that will have the best chance of achieving exceptional results for home owners. We don’t want to reduce or eliminate the role of realtors but rather recommend the best ones.
Our belief is there are way too many agents out there and we hope to point home owners to the great ones and away from the poor ones.
5. Who is your typical user?
Our typical user is a home seller seeking to list their home with a full service Realtor. That tends to skew the demographics older (45+) and slightly toward females.
In terms of geography, the majority of our users are in California, where home prices are high, the market has turned the most dramatically away from the seller and where the decision as to who should sell a home is more considered.
6. What’s your business model?
Our business model is very similar to that of Google and Yahoo search, whereby agents are able to be placed in the top three sponsored listings of a particular geography and only pay if a home owner contacts them via the phone or email.
7. Who have you identified as your biggest competitors? Why?
Our primary competitors are lead generation firms like Housevalues. Another deep belief of ours is that the lead generation industry has lost the trust of the consumer and is ripe for change. We hope to flip the model on its head by putting the consumer in control of the contact (rather than having it disappearing behind a form and then auctioned off to the highest bidder and re-sold 14 times).
And to a lesser extent the yellow pages companies. If anything, we aim to be a focused Yellow Pages 2.0 firm.
8. What have you found to be the most effective ways to market (i.e., build the brand awareness/mindshare of) your site?Companies like Apple and Google have shown that building great products is the only way to market. Great design, powerful features and ease of use are today’s marketing. Everything else – PR, search engine optimization, advertising – stems from there.
9. Web 2.0 is often defined as a web-based service that lets people collaborate and share information online. How does your site either a) incorporate these ideas or b) plan on incorporating these ideas in the future?
We allow sites to syndicate out our data via RSS and more recently GeoRSS, whether they be reviews of agents or recent home sales data in a particular geography. Of course we also allow consumers to post detailed reviews about their experience with agents online and email that to their friends and neighbors.
10. Why do you care about real estate?
In Australia (where I am originally from), we have a saying “A man’s home is his castle�. No other asset has such financial and emotional significance than a home. It’s part science, part art and part pornography. In no other industry are consumers so enraptured than in real estate.
At the same time, the Internet has the potential to have such a profound effect on the masses of real estate related information. How could we not be excited!
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In the next installment of Real Estate 2.0 Market Leaders series I’ll be looking outside US borders at what developments are happening around the world. If you know of any sites based in Europe, Canada, Australia or elsewhere that you’d like to see featured, please post them in the comments below.
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3 Comment(s)
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- From Real Estate Blogs | Jun 6, 2007
wes | Jun 28, 2006 | Reply
Interesting idea. I like the fact that you really can get the word out about the Realtors. There are good Realtors out there and I see this helping make the decision a little easier when choosing a Realtor.
I don’t see how Realtors (except those trying to hide things) would mind this site at all. It does open doors to the Realtors MLS data as far as comparables and so on. But so does Zillow. Unlike Zillow though the information about properties is not the highlight, the focus is on the ‘testimonials’.
I feel the testimonials are the weak link in this website. How do we know that they are real? That the Realtor just didn’t post them? I didn’t see anything to insure me that the ’surveys’ or testimonials are real. There are so many sites out there that mislead you with testimonials that I think people are just sick of them.
This will be an interesting site to see in the next 6 months. See where they are at, see what the public thinks and so on. This is a promising stat ‘Homethinking is currently tracking 1,209,102 Realtors across 335,331 home sales transactions.’ Let’s see what it says in 6 months.
Ben | Jun 28, 2006 | Reply
I think this is a great idea and I think if I were looking for an agent, this site would appeal to me.
But, it does have a long ways to go before it can truly be meaningful, at lease here in Seattle. In looking at several neighborhoods, I found: (1) the data is inaccurate, (2) essentially displays two companies, neither of which are the biggest listing companies, (3) is not a member of the MLS.
Since Homethinking is not a member of the NWMLS it’s data will never be accurate so I’m guessing its just parsing data from other sites. Search results overwhelming show agents with CBB and C21. C21 is a non-entity in Seattle; at least CBB is among the top 4. But where’s Windermere (by far #1 in listings), John L. Scott or Remax? Are they relying on companies and agents to provide them their data? It almost seems like CBB and C21 are “sponsoring” their listings.
Also, where exactly are they getting their sold data from? The MLS is the only true source that’ll correlate sold properties to an agent.
I looked at a number of agents to verify their “currently selling” numbers and they’re woefully inaccurate. I found a number agents where Homething is showing selling numbers in the double digits, but the MLS shows differently. One in particular showed “currently selling” 13 properties but in the MLS there were only 3 listings. Misleading… anyone?
Don’t get me wrong, I like this concept and I’d like to see it catch on. I realize they’re only in beta, but at this point, there is little value.
P.S. I just saw that their “Search the MLS” goes to Homegain. So, Homethinking may not be as altruistic as they’re leading users to believe.
Mike Kirner | Jun 14, 2007 | Reply
How is a owning a home related to
pornography?
explain this.
mike kirner