House Hunting At Your Fingertips
More and more these days, traditional house hunting with real estate brokers has changed. People have turned to the Internet for instant answers.
An Internet real estate company, HomeSeekers, based in Southern California does just that. In it's second anniversary, HomeSeekers hosts brokers' Web sites, sells software, conducts technology seminars and advertises on its site. And its service is free to house-hunters. A Web site tailored to a specific broker ranges from about $700 to just under $1,000 a year. That is how they also make their money.
Greg Costley, chairman and chief executive officer of HomeSeekers.com, Inc., clicked onto the Reno-based site himself, when he moved here from Brea, California last year.
"We went through probably 80 houses or so. Our two teen-age daughters who were still at home were there telling us what they wanted to have. We culled it down to maybe 15 houses that we wanted to look at," he said.
His wife and their real estate agent toured some of those before Costley joined them. "The first house we went through was the one we bought," he said.
Most of the company's 180 employees still work in Southern California, although a few are based in Nevada.
Since its inception, it has built Web pages for more than 20,000 real estate brokers and now offers some 850,000 listings for home seekers that are updated daily. Thousands more brokers use the company's software.
Chris Lane of Chris Lane Sales Team, a Re-Max agency in Upper Montclair, N.J. uses the site to post virtual tours of her listings. "Eighty percent of the buyers that we're getting right now are coming from the Internet," she said. "It's an incredible change in my business in the last 16-18 months."
Costley said the service makes brokers' jobs easier by bringing them clients who already have a neighborhood or even -- like him -- a specific house or two in mind.
"Our objective is to help agents be more able to be advisers rather than drivers, taxiing people around for a few days," he said.
Like its competitors and many other dot-com companies, profitability is in the future, although sales are strong. HomeSeekers lost $3.5 million in the quarter that ended Dec. 31 and is some $10 million in the hole since the company's inception, Costley said.
The revenue for the quarter was $2.7 million, up from $1.4 million the previous three months and up $1 million from a year earlier.
Costley says the goal is to be operating in the black by the end of September.
"It is our feeling that we will be the first in our category to reach profitability," he said. "I am sure that there is going to be a group of companies three or five or whatever the number may be that will thrive and be ultimately very successful. Obviously, we intend to be one of that group."