In our latest real estate tech interview, I’m talking to Mark Bloomfield from Homeasap, a provider of online marketing solutions for real estate professionals, in Jacksonville.
What do you do?
Over the past five years, we’ve successfully built the largest social media marketing platform ever serving the RE industry, now used by over 470,000 agent-members.
The platform has expanded over the years to support a growing suite of marketing services and tools for agents including the Company’s flagship service, The Real Estate Agent Directory on Facebook. We pioneered the integration of IDX display of listings on Facebook for agents and brokers, and were the first company to fully leverage the Facebook platform for agents as a prime marketing channel. Facebook has since surpassed all online sources as the #1 place for real estate leads. We launched and manage some of the most active Facebook groups dedicated to the real estate conversation, including the largest group of any on Facebook, the REA Group with ~35K members.
Why do you do what you do?
There are a couple of quotes that I’m hardwired to, both by Thomas Edison, a personal hero of mine: “There’s a way to do it better – find it.” and “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work“. These simple statements are core to the real inventor who believes if there is a better way. I believe there is a better way.
Over the past 5 years, I’ve witnessed a massive paradigm-shift of online consumer traffic that moved from agent/broker sites in favor of large 3rd party portals. There are many reasons for this (money, technology, data, marketing, politics, legal). However, the phenomenon has influenced the entire industry at every level, some for the better, and some not. This is true particularly at the agent level where local website traffic is nonexistent and the cost of online leads is high.
I do what I do because our company has been putting in place for years, the pieces necessary to help swing the online consumer pendulum back to the local agent and broker from the portals, while also improving upon and advancing the very attributes that made the portals appealing to begin with. The market will become more efficient, traffic acquisition improved, and local agents will be more in control of their online businesses. As a company, we do what we do because we want to see this vision come to fruition.
What are you most excited about right now?
I’m most excited about the next phase of our growth as we rollout and begin to ramp up our newest service, Search Alliance. It has taken years for us to bring all of the data and technology pieces together to make this service a reality. We believe it can power the next industry paradigm shift, making agents and brokers more relevant in the early search process, and by shifting online consumer traffic from the portals back to agents and brokers.
Nothing like it has ever been tried before. To slay the giants who have become direct competitors to local industry, it will take massive cooperation among agents and brokers across the country. The Search Alliance platform effectively empowers agents irrespective of location, brand or allegiance to work together for a common purpose while at the same time working for themselves thru coopetition. As their technology and data partner, we can match every portal technical and data advantage, and deliver it via agent or broker site on the network.
Agents working cooperatively push traffic across the network to each other in the interest of delivering every consumer the best user-experience and best local representation possible, while also fully benefitting from the traffic stream. Leveraging the hundreds of millions in collective marketing spend from tens of thousands of participating agents who also prospect daily at the street level, will evolve into a formidable competitor to the portals who must spend regularly and heavily to maintain consumer mindshare.
Once Search Alliance is in full ramp mode, we feel confident that 100,000 agents will become active members within 18-24 months, and the platform should reach a tipping point with homebuyers and sellers in the U.S. as a major alternative means to the portals.
What’s next for you?
We have a number of other pioneering technologies we’re developing, including one we patented a few years ago that removes the opaqueness and fear from the offer process, while providing transparency. This technology could substantially reduce the time to sell by using market-forced pricing to determine true value. We are also focused on driving high quality buyer and seller traffic to the Search Alliance network, and have been working with Facebook to integrate our platform intelligently to their ad platform, which will produce some very cost-effective traffic for our members.
What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?
The homeless in our country. It’s a problem that can be solved and there’s no reason that, in a country as rich as ours, we should have anyone homeless. I see this through our local homeless here in Jacksonville, where I work with and support a local street pastor who, once himself homeless, now dedicates his life to helping the homeless get a place they can call their own. Given that I’m in the “home” business with Homeasap, it’s a problem that’s close to my heart and one that I hope to help eradicate, at least in my own town, in my next life’s chapter.
The post Meet the Real Estate Entrepreneur — Mark Bloomfield from Homeasap appeared first on GeekEstate Blog.
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