It's been awhile since Washington, D.C.-based real estate startup Homesnap has made the headlines. In 2012, the startup landed an investment from venture capital firm Revolution and then flew back under the radar.
Five years later, Homesnap now claims to be the fastest-growing platform for real estate brokers, with more than 750,000 members using its platform. And Homesnap is the public face of the Broker Public Portal, a project between professional real estate brokerages and multiple-listing services, which is used by real estate brokers to form home valuations and more, to create a national consumer home search platform.
But, before we dive into the growth, let's back track a bit. Here's how Homesnap works: The startup has both a consumer-facing product and an enterprise set-up. For consumers, they can download the app on their phones and use it as an assistant of sorts when they're walking around their neighborhood. See a house you like? Just open Homesnap, take a picture and bam! All the information you need to know about the home is there.
For real estate brokers, they're able to add their contact information to their own listings for free, which isn’t the case at competitors like Zillow or Trulia. Also, with Pro services, agents can watch as their clients look up new places, allowing them to get more background information on the kinds of listings the potential homebuyers really want to see.
Homesnap brings in revenue through its Pro services by the MLS providers who have signed up and used it. Agents also can purchase Pro services, such as managing clients and marketing themselves, to help them manage their listings.
As Homesnap continues to grow and gain the recognition of the industry's biggest names and MLS providers, they brought on a new CEO in January 2017: John Mazur. He was connected with investors at Revolution, and from the day he was introduced to the platform, Mazur was hooked.
"I was just smitten from Day 1 for a number of reasons. It's a really unique technology solution in the industry that is really unprecedented, and the company was growing at rapid pace," Mazur said. "The growth has been so much velocity that [the founders] needed help, and I jumped right on it."
Mazur points out that the real estate industry is pretty fragmented, saying that there's no universal system where real estate agents and brokers can manage their day-to-day business. That's what Homesnap solves. An agent can move from California to Texas and not miss a beat.
"When I came into the business, with any high-growth company, the number one thing was to focus because there's so much opportunity that we have," Mazur said.
The new-ish CEO behind Homesnap said it's hard to try and figure out what exactly you do focus on in a high-growth company. Next year, alone, the company is on track to double its employee size. In the past year, they grew their user base 250 percent and added 500,000 agents alone to the platform.
"We really need to, this year, to prepare the company to continue to scale, which we did," Mazur said.
In 2018, Mazur's goal is to not only sustain the high-speed growth they're experiencing, but also to get the word out about Homesnap and its story.
"Homesnap has been, outside of the industry, been pretty much under the radar for a lot of reasons," Mazur said. "A big part of what we want to do in 2018 is really getting the message out about who we are."
