philipdlang

Interesting thought about the e-mails. It seems like salesforce or zoho would also be perfectly adequate for scaling customer service. Have you tried those?

Would love anyone's thoughts on this post!

I somewhat agree here, but when a company is small it could be awkward to have a policy where you buy computers for some and not for others, right?

This is specifically for early-stage founders. If you haven't raised much yet, how do you deal with new employees coming in? Do you buy them new laptops? Buy refurbished macs?

You make an interesting point. One of the issues, however, is that all of the data is created within the industry. Because brokers create and control the data, companies must work within the system in order to access the data.

Spot on there. Selling to the broker franchises in a B2B play is much easier than selling to individual agents in a B2C play. You have to prove to brokers that they are going to make more commissions and it is extremely hard to prove that ROI.

The paid per commission model has been tried by very few companies. It would expose a company to a significant amount of market risk (housing drops like 2008 and your SAAS play is now dead), but could make sense. The issue there is tracking closed deals. There are so many complications during the close that are out of the hands of the software.

Interesting - at what price point do you think people would need to see it in person first? Certainly some sites have proven people will buy ever-more-expensive goods online, but real estate hasn't gotten there yet...

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It could be difficult for them to sustain revenue growth once they've sold to a critical mass of brokers...

https://ycharts.com/companies/Z/revenue_growth

I wonder if Zillow and Trulia would ever consider hiring brokers to grow their revenue...

Yes, that is an assumption I make in the article. A 20% downpayment is going to be the minimum that you would need for any bank to approve you for a mortgage. Many readers either have that cash in their bank account or the ability to get help from (extremely) generous parents.

That's a valid point and I'll follow up with a future post about the economics of buying, but to realize a return on a home you need a time horizon of 5 years. With the shift to more urban life, I don't think that 5 years is an unrealistic amount of time to live in one place. In major metropolitan areas, there are often plenty of alternative jobs available and people tend to be tied down due to family obligations.

Would love feedback from the HN community on this post!