HomeLight.com, which matches consumers with real estate professionals, is rapidly growing and nabbed $40 million this week to further enhance its process for locating agents based on performance metrics. The site, founded in 2012, connects sellers with real estate agents based on the practitioners’ sales performance data.
HomeLight culls data from more than 100 different sources and evaluates nearly 30 million transactions across the country. It aims to identify the top agents in a given region based on factors such as how quickly they close transactions and whether they get the best prices for their sellers’ homes.
“A good agent matters,” says founder and CEO Drew Uher. The company says homes sold through HomeLight sell 29 days faster and fetch a price 3.5 percent higher than the average listing. “I had the idea for HomeLight when my wife and I were looking to purchase our first home,” Uher told Forbes.com. “While it was easy to find a real estate agent, it felt like it was hard to find a good one—especially one who specialized in our area, price point, and other needs. It was just impossible to know if an agent we were talking to was truly qualified to help us.”
HomeLight offers its service free of charge to consumers, but it collects a fee from the agent if a sale is closed. Agents owe nothing, however, if the referral doesn’t pan out. HomeLight says its platform has led to more than $2 billion in closed real estate transactions to date. Company officials say HomeLight’s revenue has grown by nearly 500 percent since its last round of funding in early 2016, adding that they will use the latest round of funding to grow their team.
Source: “HomeLight Raises $40M in Series B Funding to Help You Find a Listing Agent,” Forbes.com (Aug. 15, 2017) and “Homelight Raises $40 Million to Help Home Sellers Find the Best Real Estate Agents,” TechCrunch.com (Aug. 15, 2017)
