HomeLight, a startup building a contingency-free homebuying process, launched two of its flagship products — HomeLight Trade-In and HomeLight Cash Offer — in Arizona on Monday.
The product news was coupled with a personnel announcement: HomeLight plans to hire up to 300 more people in Arizona in the next six to 12 months.
HomeLight officially shifted its headquarters from San Francisco to Scottsdale earlier this year and the company currently employs about 200 in Arizona. Once the hiring push is complete, HomeLight hopes to employ 500 Arizonans.
In an interview, HomeLight founder and CEO Drew Uher said that the head office shift is, in part, a formality since Scottsdale has long been the company’s largest employee hub. Plus, the state has been a good place to find talent.
“We have just seen fantastic success in Arizona,” he said. “California is tricky to do business in for a variety of reasons, and Arizona has been a great alternative.”
HomeLight still has a large team in the Bay Area, but Uher said in 2016 it was clear to the team that they could not scale operations in that part of the country. So, the HomeLight team made a list of cities close to San Francisco (a two and half hour flight or less) that could be viable growth options.
They came up with Salt Lake City, Denver, Sacramento, Las Vegas and Scottsdale, where the team then posted jobs and conducted interviews in the five respective markets, with Scottsdale emerging as the best choice based on the availability and talent of its labor force.
Most of these 300 new jobs will be in sales and operations, with additional staff going toward the mortgage and title and escrow teams. HomeLight currently employs about 600 people globally.
The hiring comes on the heels of a big capital raise for HomeLight. Last month the company raised a combination of debt and equity worth $363 million in a round that came with a $1.6 billion valuation.
Building a network
HomeLight envisions a homebuying experience without contingencies, streamlining the process and eliminating (some) uncertainty from these high stakes transactions.
One key, Uher said, is HomeLight’s strong real estate agent network, which is currently 28,000 strong, because these agents are always looking for innovative products to give them an edge.
HomeLight offers a more traditional suite of tools — mortgages, title and escrow, listings management and offers management — but the company is making its name with its own unique tools to help simplify the homebuying process.
With the Cash Offer program, people sell their homes to HomeLight, pick a new house to buy and HomeLight makes an all-cash offer on their behalf. From there, HomeLight holds the new home until the customer secures financing and then sells the home back to the customer. The Cash Offer option is designed to give people access to a home's value quickly and turns all buyers (even those who need a mortgage) into cash buyers.
The Trade-In program allows people to sell their home to HomeLight and get into a new home before selling the previous home, which helps avoid the stress of buying and selling at the same time.
Uher sees these products as a five-way win for all parties: Sellers get assurance, offers from buyers are stronger with HomeLight without contingencies, agents from both sides are happy because transactions move quicker with less uncertainty and HomeLight itself wins after it takes its a 1% fee.
These products launched just 18 months ago and are currently available in California, Colorado, Florida, Texas and Arizona as of Monday, with more to come in the future.
Going public?
Looking down the line, Uher said going public is definitely in his plans.
“I believe that HomeLight will be a publicly traded company. ... The market opportunity in front of us is just so big, ultimately, it will make sense for us,'' he said.
“We don't have a set timeline, we've done a lot of IPO readiness work to just make sure that we have the financial controls, the auditing, so on and so forth all in place, so that we can choose to go public when the time is right for us.”
In June, HomeLight appointed Sean Aggarwal to its board of directors. Aggarwal, current chair of the board at Lyft, has deep experience bringing startups to the public markets, a skillset that is likely to come in handy.
