Five Questions with….Homezilla
In Canada, there is sadly no Zillow.
How come? It’s because the Canadian Real Estate Association has a stranglehold on real estate listings in Canada. MLS/CREA has gone after several upstart start-ups who have tried to finagle their way into the market, including Housing 123.
Nevertheless, Homezilla is hoping to establish a foothold in the online real estate market by doing everything except provide information about real estate properties - at least for now. Instead, Homezilla aims to give home owners and potential home owners in-depth information about neighbourhoods (schools, stores, parks, etc.).
I had the chance recently to ask Homezilla founder Sandy Ward about the Toronto-based company’s plans.
Q: Can you provide some background about Homezilla’s founders?
I am the sole founder of HomeZilla. While I don’t have a background in real estate, over a decade of Internet development experience has taught me the importance of making information available.
Q: So, why create Homezilla? What need/problem is it hoping to fill?
Every time someone looks to buy a house they ask questions like: where is the closest school? Are there a lot of kids around here? How far to a coffee shot? Until now, this information wasn’t easy to find. HomeZilla’s goal is help home buyers save time and be more confident in their home buying decision by providing all of this information in an easy-to-use format. Consumers want more information before they make a purchase; HomeZilla is offering new data to help home buyers.
The market also seemed open to new companies. Canada’s real estate market has been slow to use new Web technology to help home buyers. We saw this
as a huge opportunity to connect and help a large, and realtively, untapped audience.
Q: Whose the target audience? How do you engage people who already own homes?
Our main target audience is the home buyers. Home sellers and real estate agents make up the rest of our total audience. For the next 6 months, HomeZilla will focus on helping consumers in the home buying process. We still have a lot of work to make the home buying process faster. While the focus is on homebuyers, real estate agents will also use HomeZilla to save time when they are researching a new listing.
Q: Several companies have tried to compete against MLS using mash-ups? Do you see Homezilla eventually becoming a house listing service as well?
Without a doubt, at some point in 2009 we will need to have listings to compete with other up and coming real estate sites. Our advantage will come from a combination of our HomeZilla Analytics and our mandate to make the home buying process faster and easier.
HomeZilla Analytics is a set of reports on how and what home buyers are searching on HomeZilla. These statistics can be produced for a province, city, neighbourhood, or even a specific street. The HomeZilla Analytics will be a boost to helping provide context to a listing.
Q: What’s the business model?
The business model is made up of three parts. First, advertising needs to be part of our revenue. Because we have a small, but hard to reach audience, we will charge a high CPM but all the ads on HomeZilla have the ability to be hyper-targeted down to a neighbourhood level.
The other two major pieces of our business model relate to data. HomeZilla has collected unique data from all across Canada; that has value. Also, our HomeZilla Analytics gives unique insights into what is valued by people looking for a house in a certain community. We are already talking with companies in two different industries for the rights to purchase/use our data.
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