Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Last week real estate referral innovators at HomeLight announced the launch of Simple Sale, a marketplace for connecting instant buyers with home sellers. The new launch may help the startup capitalize on its data-driven approach to making real estate agent recommendations to home sellers.
The new marketplace gives home sellers access to a pool of 100 preapproved local and national iBuyers across 40-plus U.S. market in what HomeLight says is an alternative to the traditional listing process for those looking to expedite the sale of their home.
The Simple Sale network of iBuyers includes OpenDoor, Offerpad, We Buy Houses, and Roofstock to give home sellers and agents instant offers on any property. The new service accentuates HomeLight's nationwide agent marketplace for home sellers and buyers.
HomeLight, for those unfamiliar, is a San Francisco startup that received help from Google Ventures, which was launched back in 2012. Since that time, HomeLight has seen clients lists over $10 billion in homes on the platform. J.J. McCarthy, who is the GM of Simple Sale at HomeLight, offered this comment via the company's press release:
“The number of iBuyer options has exploded, but home sellers and agents looking for instant offers have been limited to comparing prices through repeated online searches from multiple sources. Through buyer relationships we’ve established in more than 40 U.S. markets, Simple Sale lets home sellers find the best iBuyer for any home on one platform.”
The Simple Sale service is a platform that estimates the most competitive offers from multiple buyers, and then compares those offers to the price a seller could expect. For agents, Simple Sale is a brilliant tool to allow for instant offers to home sellers in a hurry to sell.
With the release of Simple Sale, HomeLight tries to grab a leg--up on competitors like Movoto.com, UpNest.com, In-House Realty, and TopAgentsRanked.com, which are in the business of lead generation and valuation mostly. But the space for this kind of disruption is pretty crowded with huge players like Zillow and Opendoor playing at the edges of iBuyer magic. It will be interesting to see if HomeLight can up its game even further to become a true iBuying experience. If
HomeLight has received backing by Zeev Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SGVC, Citi Ventures, Bullpen Capital, Crosslink Capital, Montage Ventures, GV, Innovation Endeavors and others. The startup founded by Drew Uher has so far raised over $55 million in funding.
