Dream Realty Proposal
(note - the images do not display here. This link contains the following, plus the images - http://www.dreamrealty.com/Dream-Realty-Proposal.pdf)
What follows is a copyrighted and confidential real estate brokerage/technology business opportunity with excellent potential. By reading it, we appreciate that you are expressing your tacit consent to keep it confidential.
Dream Realty, LLC (Florida corporation) has a large web presence employing a sophisticated use of technology similar to Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com. The primary difference is that Dream Realty is set up as a licensed real-estate brokerage.
DreamRealty.com is a single-page web app “RESE� (real estate search engine) that extends beyond rudimentary multiple page-load real estate search concepts of legacy real estate industry search giants , such as the aforementioned Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Realtor.com. It has been thoroughly refined through more than 5 years of development and use.
A single-page application (SPA), also known as single-page interface (SPI) is a web application or web site that is displayed on a single web page with the goal of providing a more fluid user experience akin to a desktop application; thus there are no page-loads to wait for. As the user moves through properties, the right-hand section of the screen changes to show that property's complete details.
DreamRealty.com is a very slick use of the latest AJAX (asynchronous javascript and xml) and web services technologies and is EXTREMELY FAST.
The only other “RESE� (real estate search engine) that we have seen that employs this design pattern is HotPads.com – which was purchased in 2012 by Zillow for $16 million.
Although DreamRealty.com also provides gallery views as well as traditional list views and flexible agent pages, the map-search makes best use of our single-page interface.
As a real-estate brokerage, Dream Realty is entitled to direct property downloads from real estate boards. This is not true for Zillow and Trulia and to a large degree, Realtor.com. Another popular real estate brokerage, Redfin recently released a study at redfin.com/about/data-quality?src=homepage that explains how actual brokerages display more accurate and timely listings. Being a brokerage is a clear and distinct advantage. On Dec 15, 2012, Inman News released an article that elaborates on the vulnerability of ZTR (Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com) Edina Realty, the largest brokerage in the Minnesota area, pulled their listings from ZTR about 1 year ago and they are ecstatic with the results. http://www.inman.com/news/2012/12/7/to-pull-or-not-pull. There have been more mutinies recently, including Crye-Leike the largest firm in Memphis.
Currently, DreamRealty.com covers all of Mid-Florida, which includes Tampa, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Sarasota and Orlando. In January, 2014 we added the Jacksonville area (Northeast Florida Assn of Realtors). And, we are currently in the process of adding the Miami area. There are more than 260,000 pages from DreamRealty.com for display on Google.
As a Florida real-estate brokerage with advanced web search abilities, DreamRealty.com can be employed as a perfect vehicle for acquiring many agents, or can be used primarily as a lead-generating referral site or a combination of the two.
What are agents doing today?
Traditionally, agents would join a brokerage like Coldwell Banker, Century 21 or Remax and besides paying a monthly desk fee, they would split their commission with the broker. This split could be anywhere between 60/40 broker/agent – 90/10 agent/broker. A substantial number of new agents initially join one of these larger nationwide firms.
In the last several years, a new model has gained significant traction. This new model generally offers 100% commission to the agent with a small monthly fee and small transaction fee. For example, Charles Ruttenberg, one of the original 100% brokers, charges approximately $50/month and $250-$295 for each transaction.
This of course is a very interesting proposition to a large number of agents. Many, after they have learned from the business bigger guys, grow tired of daily meetings, desk fees and significant commission splits.
With the ubiquity of fast internet, an ever-increasing share of agents enjoy working from a home office equipped simply with a laptop and printer. Property showings usually entail meeting buyers at the first home or meeting sellers at their homes.
To the broker, this model can only be successful on an economies of scale basis. In most cases, a broker would need at least 250 agents to be profitable.
How do today's agents get leads?
Although the larger brokers provide “floor time� and occasionally turn over leads to their agents, many agents have turned to third-party services for lead generation.
One solution has been to partner with Trulia or Zillow for a co-branded search experience/lead generation. This is a solution for lack of in-house search tools, but it is certainly not ideal as the agent and the broker are losing an opportunity to enhance their brand and they have very little control over Trulia or Zillow.com.
Other more complete lead generation packages can be purchased from companies like BoomTownROI.com, HouseHuntNetwork.com, TigerLead.com and a host of others. In general, they will help the agent set up a somewhat sophisticated template website with IDX (Internet Data Exchange – searchable MLS downloaded properties).
These lead generation companies employ search marketing with Google.com, Bing.com and others. In general, they manage the search account and charge a monthly fee to the agent/broker/team. Leads on average, cost about $30-35. HouseHuntNetwork charges $495/month with a 15 lead guarantee. TigerLead.com was closer to $50/lead the last time I checked.
An additional option is to hook up with one of several referral websites, like www.Movoto.com, www.Estately.com and www.HomeSnap.com. These site charges agents between 30 and 35% of the commission. There is no charge if there is no sale.
Movoto recently sold to a prominent Japanese company for an undisclosed figure. http://www.inman.com/2014/02/26/movotos-tokyo-based-buyer-intends-to-make-it-the-no-1-online-real-estate-service-in-the-u-s/ Considering the fact the Hotpads.com sold for 16M and Apartments.com just sold this week for 585M – I'm guessing Movoto sold in the 20+M range. http://www.inman.com/2014/03/03/loopnet-operator-costar-buying-apartments-com-for-585m/utm_source=20140303&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsflash
What does Dream Realty offer agents?
In addition to our property search, we provide a very needed and wanted email alert service that has enormous profit potential. Most of the third-party lead generators provide a similar service.
On a daily basis, DreamRealty.com users receive email updates of new properties that meet their defined criteria. The emails also include property alerts of price-changes, sold properties and upcoming open-houses. Including sold properties help users gauge current markets so they can react accordingly.
The emails and their frequency are easily monitored on the user’s private profile page.
It is these emails that keep us in touch with potential buyers and make our agents their “goto� agent when they are ready to buy. My wife and I have consistently made over 100K in the last 5 years with email sign-ups as our only source of leads. In 2013, we netted over 150K.
Through 5 years of testing on Google.com and Bing.com, we have created some very successful ads that achieve these email sign-ups for approximately $10-$15 a piece. Over the last year, we have averaged $12 per signup.
Additionally, these emails can provide substantial advertising revenue. Ancillary servicers, like mortgage brokers, contractors, insurance agents have contacted us with regards to being included in our daily emails. We have yet to take advantage of this potential revenue source.
Agents would have the best of both worlds. Dream Realty could be a 100% commission split brokerage like Charles Ruttenberg and also provide search engine marketing using DreamRealty.com for approximately $30 per lead. This would also spare the expense of the agent acquiring and maintaining a template site, like TampaBayHomeStoreSearch.com.
Income potential
Assuming one sale per month (should be low for advertising agents) and $500 search engine spend, Dream Realty would average net $600 per agent/month.
The office space would be minimal as the vast majority of 100% commission agents work out of their home office.
Currently, approximately 1000 emails are sent out daily. Once that increases to 10,000, advertising would become of noticeable interest to servicers.
As stated above, 250 agents were needed for profitability to a Ruttenberg model. Dream Realty could be profitable with approximately 100 agents that take advantage of our google advertising offer.
With 100 advertising agents, the monthly income should be around 50-60K. Expenses would be in the neighborhood of 20-25K.
Charles Ruttenberg Realty has over 1000 agents and adds approximately 30 agents a month. They bring in additional revenue by having their own title agency that agents are encouraged to use.
It is quite realistic that Dream Realty could also expand to 1000+ agents as we would be offering our agents significantly better web technology/lead generation than Rutenberg.
Assuming we created our own title agency and were including relevant servicers in the daily emails, reaching 1000 agents would translate to approximately 400-500K/month.
One non-competing broker and 3 support staff could handle 1000 agents.
With less than 100K per month in expense, we are looking at a potential profitability of 300-400K per month and 4-5M/year.
The marketing plan to scale to 1000+ agents is the subject of another document. Within 6 months of operations, Dream Realty should be able to begin adding 25-35 agents per month.
Going the Movoto route would require much less infrastructure as Dream Realty would engaged mostly in monitoring 30% referrals.
A more in-depth look at DreamRealty.com technologies
The DreamRealty.com RESE (real-estate search engine) has some advanced feature attributes and other functionality not found on other more rudimentary map searches, including industry leaders Zillow and Trulia.
We incorporate our “beBY™� search technology (as in – “Where do you want to be by?�) which allows users to enter a city, zipcode, address or any point of interest they would like to be near. Examples being: “within 20 miles of Tampa Airport�, “5 miles from the beach.�
The following screen shots are of the www.DreamRealty.com home page.
DreamRealty.com home page
Each property has these 5 icons at the bottom right of the grid view that quickly show the important features of foreclosure status (above example not a foreclosure), pool, waterfront (which waterway), how much land and whether there is a garage. Besides these icons, we are the only map-search that includes a portion of the description so a user can quickly pick out properties of interest.
Here is DreamRealty.com with a property selected. Everything clickable toggles. Click on the property from either the grid on the left or one of the map icons (seen on the home page screen earlier) and the map disappears and the property detail appears. Click on the same property and the detail disappears and the map reappears. Click on another property and the current property detail is replaced by the new property.
The following user feedback sums up the experience quite nicely:
“There is nothing more annoying than trying to manage a plurality of page! This is an ABSOLUTELY SUPER COOL streamline means for NOT having to manage windows,..
it is essentially a ‘rapid-fire-toggle’ that swaps page views in front of the base page and iterates with each selection,.. totally cool for sure.� George Kyristis Tarpon Springs
Daily Emails
Here is a portion of a daily email based on the user's search criteria. The daily emails include new listings, price-changes, sold listings from the previous day and upcoming open-houses.
Menus
This menu appears at the top of the property detail. Each item is pretty self-explanatory.
Collaborate is not a very common search feature. DreamRealty.com allows users to collaborate extensively about properties with their friends/family/agent.
Additional options.
The “Details� view entices the user to interact with the app. They can easily make an Inquiry on the property or select any of these buttons.
The primary goal of DreamRealty.com is to entice the user to act, whether they sign up for email alerts, inquire, schedule a tour, etc. Several thousand have signed up to date.
Once having signed up, the user can easily manage their personal experience from the same home page. When they return to the site, as many regularly do, their profile is automatically loaded. If the user clicks on the “Account Settings� in the upper right, they see the screen showing their favorite properties by default.
The user can manage their account with the above menu. With “Favorites� as shown above, they can click on each and will be immediately presented with the properties detail page. This is also true for properties designated as “Like� or “Hide�. There isn't a big distinction between like and favorite. The user would receive auto-updates on “favorites.�
“Searches� shows their recent and saved searches and allows for criteria updating. “Profile� makes it easy for the user to change data about themselves including the password.
“Group� is a special feature of DreamRealty.com that allows the user to create a group of family and/or friend and/or broker with the purpose of collaboration on properties of interest. The “Collaborate� on the main properties details menu is where such notes are written and shared.
“Communication� allows the user to choose which property email updates are sent and when. In the future it will be used to select what type of services the user would like displayed in daily emails.
Dream Realty beBYâ„¢ Search Engine
This image is an example of a beBYâ„¢ query where the user wants to be within 10 miles of Tampa Airport.
The user can move the purple pins to create a more defined search area. They can also move the center blue pin to update their search area, as well change the location and search radius.
While establishing their search criteria, users can select the ‘More’ icon (now showing ‘Less’) for additional criteria to narrow their search. No matter how many criteria are chosen, the user can then save the search and receive emails that match that exact criteria.
Home Value Estimator
We have developed our own home value estimator for Pinellas County, Florida that is proven to be more accurate than Zillow.com.
With some minor tweaking and the inclusion of data from more areas, our proprietary algorithm could be used to estimate home values for any county or state.
A major reason it is more accurate than Zillow is that it is based on sales comps from the last 3 months or less. Recent sales of comparable properties are the most important criteria used by residential appraisers.
Agent Pages
Back end page that agent easily maintains.
ClearwaterDreaming.com
Our initial site was www.clearwaterdreaming.com. It is still maintained daily. It is still highly ranked with Yahoo, Bing and to a lesser degree, Google for “Clearwater real estate� and other related terms.
This format can easily be used for other cities.
Database
DreamRealty.com is powered by the popular open-source database, MySQL (now owned by Oracle).
Properties are automatically downloaded continuously from a RETS (real estate transaction server) feed. We can easily include many other MLS boards from the same RETS provider by signing up with those boards. As noted above, we very recently including NEFAR – Northeast Florida.
Android App & Mobile
We have recently released an app version of our real estate map search. We are receiving excellent feedback as it is quite functional, responsive and aesthetic.
Users report that it is much easier to use than Zillow. Anyone searching for property in mid- Florida, will definitely prefer this app to any other.
We have just incorporated Google street views, directions and list-view search into the app.
Download it and check it out for yourself! Just search Dream Realty on Google Play.
IPAD Version
Above is the home screen of the IPAD version. This is not an official app, it is written in HTML5 using the jquerymobile library to take advantage of tablet features.
It employs the same Single-page design as the desktop/laptop version.
IPAD home screen with property selected.
Marketing
Dream Realty has received 3000+ sign up through a combination of SEO (search engine optimization) and Google Adwords paid advertising.
SEO
Also known as organic results, SEO has been very effective for our sister site, www.ClearwaterDreaming.com. We have been at the top of many search engine results for Clearwater Real Estate related searches for many years. We are still #1 on Bing and Yahoo for the term “Clearwater Real Estate.�
Through SEO, we have managed to have Google include an inordinate number of pages for the size of our sites. If you go to Google.com and enter in their search bar, site:dreamrealty.com (no spaces) you should see approximately 263,000 pages from our site. With site:clearwaterdreaming.com you will find about 50,000 pages.
Very few, if any, non-national real estate site has anywhere near that many pages indexed by Google. Our SEO technology has been honed over 7 years of experience.
DreamRealty.com for Referrals
Though this document mostly postulates using Dreamrealty.com for a 100% commission brokerage, there are certainly alternative uses. DreamRealty.com could easily be used as a 30% referral brokerage like the following companies:
1. Estately.com
Estately partners with Brokers throughout the US . They provide a similar search as DreamRealty.com without implementation of a Single-page interface. Agents signup on Estately.com to become referral agents. Estately charges the agents a 30% referral fee. Estately only gets paid if/when the lead purchases a home.
2. HomeSnap.com (Sawbuck Realty)
Similar to Estately, though I believe Sawbuck joins the various boards of the MLSs included in their search. They charge 30-35% for their referred leads.
3. Movoto.com
Similar to Estately and Sawbuck. Their agent signup is short and sweet. http://www.movoto.com/agents/join
Sign up page for Referral Agents
Executive
Sheldon Goldberg, CEO & CTO.
Mr. Goldberg enjoys 30+ years of experience in business and the software industry. DreamRealty.com is his 5th startup. In the 80s, he purchased a very small oil distributorship and expanded its sales to 8 million USD. At the same time, he created his first software company, Petro, with a complete package for oil distributors that included accounts receivable, accounts payable, general ledger, inventory and convenience store modules.
In the 90s, he founded ThoroTek, Inc, another software company that created numerous applications for a very large West Coast electronics retailer. These applications included a service center management system, a field service management system, an extended warranty billing system and one of the first IVR(interactive voice response) service systems.
In the mid 90s, he founded HURLnET, one of the first billing systems for Internet Service Providers. Customers included Earthlink, Citrix Systems, British Telcom and Nippon T&T. Mr. Goldberg sold HURLnET in 1999 to an internet holding company.
In 2005, he founded Dream Realty, a Florida real-estate brokerage.
The entire software design and the vast majority of programming on DreamRealty.com was accomplished by Mr. Goldberg. He continues to expand the company's technologies.
The entire Android app, included the back-end database web-service was also developed exclusively by Mr. Goldberg.
Competition
Final notes about Zillow and Trulia
These 2 sites primarily provide real estate search and home value estimates. They also include discussions which are pretty easy to implement.
Both are now public companies as Trulia just went public in Sept, 2012. The market cap on Zillow(Z) about 3.25 Billion USD. Trulia’s(TRLA) is 1.16 Billion USD.
The primary difference between Zillow and Trulia and Dream Realty is market coverage. Z+T cover the US and much of Canada. Dream Realty currently only covers Central Florida and Jacksonville.
As stated on page 1, a major advantage of Dream Realty is that we are brokers and have direct MLS access. Our property databases are multiple times per day. There are no out-of-date properties on DreamRealty.com. You will find many on Z+T. They mostly receive their properties from www.listhub.com, which amalgamates properties from brokers then sends to Z+T and some others. Also, see recent article where Zillow complains about the lag time from List Hub. http://www.inman.com/news/2012/07/9/zillow-appeals-mlss-direct-listings-feeds.
Both Z+T are monetized primarily through general site ads from related companies like mortgage brokers. They also collect substantial revenue from “buyer’s agents� that aren’t the listing agent for the property, but are displayed on the details page.
On 02/21/2014, Inman released this article http://www.inman.com/2014/02/21/zillow-trulia-realtor-com-set-for-2014-consumer-marketing-arms-race/?utm_source=20140222&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=weeklyheadlines detailing marketing plans for ZTR for 2014.
This quote from Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia lays out the opportunity that Dream Realty can hitch their wagon to: “Our industry is still in its infancy,� Flint said. “There is tremendous opportunity to develop a leading brand and company.�
Conclusion
There is very much evidence that the real estate market is on the up-swing. On December 10, 2012, CNBC had much to say about an upcoming housing boom: http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/12/news/economy/housing-boom/index.html?fb_action_ids=10151281885624532&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=246965925417366. And 2013 was a banner year for real estate.
Users will always gravitate to a faster search experience as specified by the Single-Page-Application described previously.
With these 2 factors and the numerous sources of revenue possible, whether agent-based or referral partner-based, dreamrealty.com has the makings for the next great real estate brokerage.
We contend that with our name, Dream Realty, our logo and especially our technologies, there is a huge opportunity to develop another significant brand.
Sheldon Goldberg
CEO Dream Realty
727.512.6030
shel@DreamRealty.com
1800 The Greens Way
Suite 109
Jacksonville Beach, FL 32250
Date Listed: 03/05/14