Don’t you wish there was an app that helped you find a home that worked similar to the infamous Tinder dating app? You’d swipe right if you loved the place or left if you wanted to pass on it. Well thanks to 18-year-old Jason Marmon, people looking for rental homes and apartments can do just that.
HomeSwipe is a new mobile app that allows renters to view homes they like based on filtered preferences like price, location, number of bedrooms and others, allowing users to swipe right — similar to Tinder — to save and favorite it to come back to eventually contact the listed agent about the home, according to Inman.
Marmon dropped out of high school to work on this project full time, as schooling was getting in the way of developing the app. HomeSwipe has three co-founders: Marmon, 22-year-old Michael Lisovetsky and 43-year-old Dean Soukeras, who is an experienced New York real estate broker.
With the firm based in New York City, Lisovetsky serves as the CEO, Soukeras as the chief operating officer, and Marmon is the founder and chief technology officer. Together, they lead a seven-person firm that is working to get this app off the ground and running.
Inman reported June 5 that Marmon will receive $100,00 a a member of the Silicon Valley luminary Peter Thiel’s two-year fellowship program. The program’s purpose is to give provide young entrepreneurs the economic freedom to pursue their startups in lieu of pursuing college.
There has been $500,000 raised so far from angel investors. Lisovetsky managed to gain the interest of venture capital firms located on the famous Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley the first week of June, hoping to raise the rest of the firm’s seed round funds through these investors.
The app works similar to Doorsteps Swipe, which realtor.com launched last year, but unlike Doorsteps Swipe, Homesite shows listings only from rental brokers and agents choosing to send them to the app.
The firm currently receives rental listings from 30 brokerages in New York City and four in Chicago, but hopes to expand to other cities — one new city every six weeks — and dealing with more brokerages and agents in the cities they already are servicing. HomeSwipe, launched in August 2014 and the beta launched this May. The app only features up to 30,000 active rental listings currently and 1,200 agents to work with, but has been downloaded already more than 50,000 times.
HomeSwipe’s main feature it is selling itself on is the fast response and interaction between consumer and agent. For each lead on the mobile app, an agent is required to respond within I’ve minutes or else it will be sent to another agent, unless that rental listing is exclusively listed with a particular agent. The firm will launch its official business model June 15 which centers on a “pay-per-lead” strategy.
The group hopes to narrow the pool of agents they work with down to 500 to make it more selective and in-demand by agents in the current cities the app services and for future cities. They even see the possibility of moving into the “For Sale” home realm. The group is currently focusing on rentals seeing in the cities they serve, most the consumers rent.
Marmon, Lisovetsky and Soukeras and the small group hopes to close a $1.5 million seed round by the end of this summer, all the while working to make sure the design of the mobile app stands out then other real estate apps already available to consumers.
Source:
http://www.inman.com/2015/06/05/high-school-dropout-betting-on-his-real-estate-swipe-startup/
