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In 2021, a round of Series D financing landed HomeLight in “unicorn” status, a painfully clichéd bit of tech-speak coined in Silicon Valley bro-tanks to describe a company worth a billion dollars.
That valuation is likely a frequent topic of conversation at Clever Real Estate, a company executing a very similar model, different in only how the leads are obtained.
Clever’s Tony Cahal said in a call with Inman that it has 18,000 agents in its nationwide network, and its website publishes that more than 20,000 sales have originated with its service.
“Typical online leads close about three to seven percent of the time, ours close at 13 to 17 percent,” Cahal said.
Clever Real Estate finds its leads with extensive content marketing, reams of articles on its website designed to educate consumers on a vast range of real estate topics. The company uses calls-to-action, published research and other tactics to vet potentially actionable buyers and sellers, and only begins the matching process when a user explicitly states they’re ready to speak to an agent.
An in-house team further vets the person and gathers basic details, such as budget, location, wants, needs and the other items essential to being defined as a quality lead.
Leads that surface in an area with competing agents registered with Clever will be sent to the agent that ranks higher according to the company’s performance evaluation. There’s a timed response mechanism for claiming leads too.
HomeLight, a consumer-to-agent matching platform, uses advertising on national television to collect leads for real estate agents.
Its mantra is that consumers can save money and work with “top” agents. The last part is hard to prove, but the first, not so much.
The method is…