For the past couple of months, yourealty.com has been promising big things for the US real estate industry while revealing very little. The homepage claims that this startup, which is yet to see an alpha release, will change the way people search for real estate, connect with agents, and buy property, in the same way Google changed search and Facebook changed online relationships.
But what exactly is yourealty.com? To find out more, we spoke to co-founder Ian Utlie, who says he is building yourealty.com to be “extremely easy to use and truly effective for real estate agents.”
“We have a team of award-winning developers, designers and online marketing experts working to improve the real estate industry through better technology,” says Utlie. “We are still in stealth mode so I can’t go into too many details right now, but I can tell you that for the last couple years we have been quietly working on building a revolutionary new platform to make buying and selling real estate easier.”
When asked to explain how yourealty.com will work, Utlie would only reveal that it will use “innovative technologies to help agents find and connect with real estate clients and to market their listings more easily and effectively.”
Utlie is equally tight-lipped when it comes to yourealty.com’s plan to make money. He names advertising and premium offers for brokerages, adding that “The third way for us to monetize is what we are most excited about, however we are not going to reveal that publicly at this time.”
What Utlie can say is that yourealty.com has already generated plenty of buzz, even before the private alpha launch that is scheduled for summer. Over 14,000 people are Facebook fans of the service, and around 8,500 people are following its movements on Twitter.
“Right now, we are testing prototypes of our technology in several markets around the country,” Utlie adds. “yourealty.com will be a nationwide service and our technology would allow us to expand internationally once there was a demand for it.”
So it seems much of yourealty.com must remain a mystery for now, but we will be keeping a close eye on the service to see exactly how it works once the alpha launch is under way.
Related posts:
Loading ...
I hope for them that they deliver on the hype they have generated. There’s nothing worse then creating buzz, only to disapoint on feature.
Sometimes we use a little too much technology. I believe that at the end of the day what is really important is Simplicity in getting the right information delivered in a format the user can understand.
Oh Joy, yet another company that wants to get between me an my customer and make me pay for the privilege. How about this: I charge you $20 a month for ‘access’ to my listing information. You can then generate as much advertising or other revenue with the traffic my data will give you.
If this is like google, or facebook, that means you will send the customer my way at no cost if the customer clicks on my data that you have licensed (see above). You won’t mess with the search results page (pay to play), and advertising will be text and clean.
Why do I think neither of these will happen?