Online Real Estate Company Sets High-Tech Tone for Industry

Whenever a company gives away large sums of cash, you can assume business is pretty good.

Take RealSelect Inc., which recently cut a quarter-million-dollar check to a Virginia man to use toward the purchase of a new home.

Since starting up three years ago, the Thousand Oaks-based online real estate company has not only witnessed a tremendous surge in business, it has begun to change the way the industry does business by providing the world’s largest listings of available homes via the Internet.

“I’m not surprised by the number of people who come in to use the site,” said David Rosenblatt, RealSelect’s vice president of marketing. “Buying a home is usually the largest investment someone is going to make in their lifetime, and anything that makes that easier, I think, is going to be successful.”

RealSelect Inc. operates three Web sites, each servicing a different aspect of the real estate market.

Homebuilder.com has more than 400,000 new home listings; Commercialsource.com lists commercial properties around the nation; and Realtor.com has an inventory of more than 1.2 million homes for sale in cities from Tallahassee to Temecula.

Realtor.com is run in conjunction with the 720,000-member National Assn. of Realtors as a resource for prospective home buyers nationwide.

Along with the home listings, the sites offer educational material on how to secure financing, make an offer, close escrow and sell a residence.

Other information includes interest rates, real estate trends and tips on spicing up a home listing.

“One of the things it does is give people the confidence they need when they go out to buy a home,” Rosenblatt said. “It educates people and makes the whole process run more efficiently.”

The Realtor.com site has recorded 1.9 billion hits, suggesting that millions have visited the site. Each month, more than 6 million hits are recorded, as visitors view the ever-changing stock of homes.

The company makes its money from online advertising. Of course, it helps to be allied with the National Assn. of Realtors, which permits the site to showcase upward of 95% of all homes for sale in the country.

“It’s definitely an industry collaborative,” Rosenblatt said. “It’s taken teamwork to get this far.”

In an effort to drum up even more business, RealSelect hosted a sweepstakes that would award the grand-prize winner $250,000 to use toward the purchase of a home listed on Realtor.com.

Warren Burch of Roanoke, Va., won, and he didn’t believe it at first.

“Since we were an electronic company, we thought it would be a good idea to e-mail him with the news,” Rosenblatt said. “He didn’t believe the message so he deleted it.”

Burch, 43, was unavailable for comment, but told the Associated Press that he’d seen too many of those “you may already be a winner” letters in his mailbox, so he disregarded the message.

However, he soon received the money and, according to Rosenblatt, is busy searching for a new home.

Ventura County Realtors say the sites are providing a new and needed dimension to the business.

Kathy Mehringer of Fred Sands Brown Realty in Westlake Village, who has listed homes on the site for the past six months, said it’s no longer a luxury but a necessity.

“I wish I could say this was the wave of the future, but it’s not,” she said. “It’s today.”

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