NOT ONLY ARE THOUSANDS of home buyers cruising the Internet, thousands of real estate companies are there too _ trying to entice customers with alluring photos and virtual tours of bright kitchens and glowing paneled bedrooms.
Home Debut, a fast-growing Spokane Web-based company, has cashed in on the trend by creating the eye-catching photos and a network that lets Realtors show off their listings to potential buyers.
The 14-person downtown company uses a national team of photographers and a crew of local managers to handle the huge volume of pictures and text for properties nationwide.
Started in 1995, the company operates out of the wired Fernwell Building, the first base of the city's vaunted Terabyte Triangle.
CEO Anne Morse said the company has had a minimum of 50 percent growth every year. "We had a huge jump of 150 percent growth in 2000," she said.
This year looks like another year of 150 percent growth, said Morse. She anticipates gross revenue of at least $2.5 million.
The company focused mostly on Spokane listings when it started. It has broadened its reach in the past three years, now providing pictures for buyers in 40 states. It does that by using two Web sites. One, Tourfactory.com, lets Realtors create visual tours of homes or properties.
The second site, HomeDebut.com., is where buyers can find those pictures, learn who the seller is, plus assorted data.
Shane Delaney of Tomlinson Black in Spokane has used Home Debut for about five years. "This is a very effective system," he said.
Most of the time, he contacts home buyers and directs them to the Home Debut Web site, where they can review his listings or look at other options.
The site allows visitors to search by category, price, neighborhood and locale.
But several times he has made a sale solely because someone visited the Web site on their own, then contacted him.
Last year, Delaney was trying to sell a $640,000 home in the Ridge at Hangman development south of town. The listing became one of more than 40,000 properties available through Home Debut's Web site.
A Spokane couple logged on, saw the listing, came to an open house and told Delaney they'd buy it.
Morse said the key component of the system is the ease for Realtors using the system. Delaney pays a monthly fee to Home Debut, which maintains the listings on the Web, plus finds photographers to capture the images for the site.
Apart from the 14 local staff members, Home Debut relies on about 60 contract photographers who use digital cameras to produce the images that become the virtual tours.
Most every listing includes about 10 interior and exterior photos, all of them in "panorama" mode -- meaning the photos sweep across the interior from left to right instead of remaining static.
With lending rates low, demand for homes keeps humming along, and in turn that means high-volume traffic in and out of Home Debut's third-floor office suite.
In January, the company saw a monthly total of 5.2 million page visits to its Home Debut site, said Bill Haney, the company's chief information officer.
"We're on track to see higher volumes than that in February." That doesn't include all the visits made by would-be buyers to other Web sites that also carry the same images and text created by Home Debut.
When Delaney, for instance, goes to Tour Factory and accesses his account, he requests that the listings he adds be included on three separate Web sites -- Home Debut, the Spokane Tomlinson Black site, and a separate, personal site for his listings.
Delaney said he likes being able to log onto Tour Factory, make any changes he needs in the listings, then see the results almost instantly.
"Their service is incredible," he added. "Their site is never down."
For now, nearly all the listings on Home Debut are residential; just 2 percent of the 40,000 listings are commercial, said Morse.
She and her former husband, Stacy Morse, launched the company in 1995. Though they've since divorced, Stacy remains a company vice president, working from Bellevue.
Two years ago, as business was booming, Home Debut moved from a north Spokane office to the Fernwell Building. It's one of several building tenants thriving on the rich fiber broadband network feeding the Terabyte Triangle area of downtown Spokane.
Home Debut's service provider, OneEighty Networks, provides them enough bandwidth to handle several hundred simultaneous connections.
Dozens of competitor Web companies are trying to do what Home Debut has done, she said. "In the Western United States, no one is doing exactly what we are," Morse said. While numerous competitors also offer photo-rich listings, Morse said Home Debut is among the first to develop strong Web applications for Realtors to create their own listings and modify them.
Added Dave Gay, Home Debut's chief operating officer: "Lots of people think it's easy to do this. It's not. We're doing well because we know who our customers, the real estate industry, are." |
