Making a Homie Away From Home: How the real estate tech company jumped into a new market.

• Author: Christensen, Lisa
• Position: Lessons Learned

When Homie launched in 2015, the tech company was hoping to revolutionize the real estate industry. And when it started getting traction in Utah, the company started to think bigger and began to make plans for expanding throughout the country.

Homie's technology enables home buyers and sellers to handle much of the work themselves, with the added assistance of licensed real estate agents, attorneys and other experts. Within 18 months of launching, the company was the largest brokerage in Utah with over 200 property listings each month.

In its bid to disrupt the real estate industry on a national scale, CEO Johnny Hanna says the company realized it would be a more productive route to take it slow and learn lessons along the way. Homie's first stop? Arizona.

Researching the market

"We researched what areas had the most similarity to Utah in terms of economic growth, education, employment--a lot of those numbers were important to us, along with the housing stock. We wanted to go to an area with newer homes that had been built, newer subdivisions, because those are the houses that go in two seconds," he says. "You know how to price the home, it's not a unique farm with five acres. It's a typical suburban home and you know what your neighbors paid."

There were several real estate regulations and legal details that differed between the Beehive State and its neighbor to the south. Because Homie recently opened up a mortgage division to help streamline the process of funding the buying and selling process, differences in funding regulations were also vital to navigate, says Hanna.

Spreading the message

In addition to regulatory differences, the marketing landscape is different in the Phoenix area than it is along the Wasatch Front. "Here in Utah, we have a single highway, so billboards work well for us here. But Phoenix is a much bigger city, and not everyone drives on the same highway, so we had to advertise and market on radio, tv, social media, in addition to billboards," Hanna says.

Social marketing proved particularly fruitful; between the posts Homie was sponsoring and the segments of television interviews posted on those stations' pages, Hanna says there was an enthusiastic response with people tagging their friends who were trying to buy or sell homes.

The rollout into Arizona was easier in many ways from Homie's original launch chiefly because the company has a larger budget--and venture capital funding--to help market the company, says...