Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Real estate technology startup Homie says it's to expand its services to Phoenix, Arizona, after seeing massive success in its home base of Utah.
The company, which also expanded into mortgage lending last year, said it selected Phoenix as its second market because of the area’s market size and seasonality.
The company launched in Utah in 2015, and boasts that it can save home sellers an average of $10,000 by utilizing technology throughout the home selling process.
Rather than working with a single agent, Homie customers are assigned a team of licensed real estate agents, attorneys and experts that help them throughout the sales process.
Homie helps sellers with listing, pricing, photography, marketing, negotiations, and paperwork, all for a flat fee of $1,498 to list. In addition, Homie buyers can qualify for a refund of up to $5,000 on homes with a buyer agent commission.
According to the company, its model is working in Utah. The company claims that it had more unique listings than any other Utah brokerage in 2017, making it the state’s top listing brokerage. And now, Homie is expanding to Phoenix.
“Homie’s motto is ‘We’ve got your back.’ To deliver on that promise in our Utah market, we combined technology with personalized service—providing customers with a simpler, more transparent process and some pretty dramatic savings,” Johnny Hanna, Homie CEO and co-founder, said.
“Our customers used the technology to handle much of the transaction themselves and they loved the savings,” Hanna added. “But they also wanted some hand-holding to make it through tricky negotiations, contracts, and closings. I’m excited to now share this model with home buyers and sellers in Phoenix.”
The company told Desert News that it is also preparing for a Series A round of funding this spring or early summer and that cash injection will help finance further expansion, first to a select group of metro areas followed by a national effort, he said.
