The internet has changed the game for home sales, with online listing sites such as Zillow and Redfin giving potential buyers in-depth views of homes before they ever contact the seller.
It’s also led to a rise in startups seeking to disrupt the real estate industry, and one of the latest is headquartered in Vancouver: Homeworthy, a service that seeks to help homeowners sell their houses direct-to-buyer.
The service also leans into the online communication aspect as hard as possible: In a typical Homeworthy transaction, the seller will never meet their Homeworthy advisor in person.
“Technology is what’s going to power home sales moving forward,” says founder and CEO Corey Walters. “We can go from start to finish by text messages the entire time.”
The company’s primary pitch for the online model is savings. Homeworthy takes a 1 percent commission from every transaction, which Walters claims will lead to an average savings of $20,000 compared to the typical rate of 5 to 6 percent in the residential real estate industry.
In traditional residential real estate, most homes for sale are entered into a regional Multiple Listing Service, a database used by real estate brokers. But Homeworthy skips that step for its own listings, opting instead to focus on targeted marketing of individual properties on real estate platforms like Zillow and social media platforms like Facebook.
Walters pitches this as another advantage of the service, enabling it to get home listings on the market faster than a traditional real estate service. Walters also pitches the concept as a time-saver for the industry, because it avoids the hours that traditional real estate agents tend to spend commuting between houses.
“That ties up a lot of time,” he says.
The listing process starts by entering a home address on Homeworthy’s website, but subsequent communications with a company real estate advisor will be carried out via text message, which Walters says was a deliberate choice to create a lower barrier to entry for homeowners by letting them connect using an existing service rather than downloading and setting up a new app.
Creating the company
Walters says the idea for the company grew out of his own experience when he and his wife tried to sell their home by owner. They found the process to be overwhelming and complicated, he said, and eventually gave up and listed their house on Redfin.
He lived in New York at the time, and began to pitch investors on the idea of a company that would specifically help with the for-sale-by-owner process.
He found a group of interested partners in New York, but opted to move to Washington to launch the service due to the state’s strong history as starting ground for real estate technology companies, including established giants such as Redfin and Zillow as well as newer startups like Flyhomes, JetClosing and Flipt.
Working out of an office inside CoLab in downtown Vancouver, Walters began to build the company’s local real estate team, recruiting certified real estate agents to serve as Homeworthy advisers for the Washington market.
The company has about 10 employees — five on its Washington real estate team, plus five more advisers and members of its tech team in either Washington or New York.
The service launched statewide at the start of February. Eventually, Walters plans to expand service to the rest of the country.
“We could be in Oregon today if we wanted to, but we wanted to master one state first,” Walters says. “We have a strategy to rapidly scale into 50 states.”
One of the reasons for a slower rollout is to allow the company to take the time to build a network of local specialists, Walters says, so the teams can recommend local assessing agents, photographers, and contractors that a home seller might need during the process.
Changing real estate landscape
A high-tech approach to real estate isn’t a novel idea. As an example, Walters cites the online company REX, which similarly emphasizes online and direct-to-buyer marketing. Redfin is another example, but Walters characterizes Homeworthy as a more user-friendly model.
Homeworthy also plans to distinguish itself by offering self-guided home tours, with scheduled unsupervised visits from pre-qualified buyers who have passed background checks. Walters compares the model to Airbnb, which he says was a tough sell at first but eventually won over landlords and renters.
“We think we can do the same for home showings,” he says. “You know what the home looks like before you arrive — everybody knows — what you want to know is do you want to live here?”
Walters says Homeworthy and other online services will inevitably compete with the traditional real estate market, but he describes Homeworthy as more of a niche service. Its target market is sellers who want to sell by owner but can’t keep up with the details of the process. And he says he expects Homeworthy to primarily assist in the sale of medium-value homes, ranging from around $255,000 to $400,000, although the service can be used for homes of any value.
“I don’t think that real estate agents are going away,” he says. “There’s not going to be a winner-take-all in real estate. Our goal is to provide an option and see where it takes us.”
