Today we’d like to introduce you to Edward Kim.
Edward, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I started in the Real Estate Tech space in 1999 as a Sales Executive with Real Estate Village who was first to market with a template website and hosting for real estate agents. I was promoted to Sales Manager about 6 months after hire to help train and grow our sales effort nationally. Around 2000, we were acquired by a venture backed Homes.com based in Tallahassee, FL to become the main sales force for their Portal advertising products and Agent Advantage websites.
Due to some bad business decisions and poor acquisitions by the upper management team, Homes.com filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 2002 and the venture capital fund effectively released the entire upper management team. The Venture Capital fund put Tom Orsi, John Perkins, myself in charge to exit Chapter 11 and sell the company. In 2005, Homes.com was successfully acquired by Trader Publishing (later became Dominion Enterprises). I stayed with Dominion Enterprises through 2010 in various leadership roles but moved on and followed Tom Orsi and John Perkins to Home Junction, a privately funded start-up. While I was transitioning from Homes.com to Home Junction, I served as consultant to the largest real estate portal in Australia and started my own digital marketing firm in Tijuana, MX called BuscaTijuana.
Has it been a smooth road?
Home Junction started in 2007 with low 8 figures in private funding but like most start-ups we went through the money quickly while succeeding in becoming a high-level real estate data aggregation and technology company. Revenue usually was not the issue, it was higher than expected expenses in an ever-changing competitive space, so there were some lean years especially the first 5 years. While real estate data licensing was our main focus we started a SaaS product line developing custom applications and WordPress websites for real estate brokers and agents. The SaaS side definitely had some of its own challenges and growing pains but we are better for it today and thriving in the space. Through it all we always invested back into the company to make our customer experience and user experience better. I always say if you are not getting better than you are getting worse, things don’t stay the same.
Real estate and technology is evolving constantly as there are many new disruptive (as pundits would say) technology models which I call evolutionary models that is changing the way you buy or sell a house. From a business standpoint, I still believe a real estate agent or broker will always be involved but the connection and delivery of information is evolving rapidly. There are platforms out there now on the buy side where you can get pre-approved, research hard to get data, find properties in the right school’s zones, schedule a showing, esign offer letter, review counter offer, do your mortgage docs, escrow and title, all in one place online and finally get your keys (not online). keep up!
We’d love to hear more about your business.
Home Junction is unique in the real estate tech space because we offer data licensing and SaaS (Software as a Service) to our customers under one roof. Most companies are either one or the other. On the data side we have 100s of end points and data layers in real estate from boundary overlays (neighborhood, school attendance zones, parcels and flood plain layer) to public records (property pedigree) of over 150M properties nationally to an AVM (Automated Valuation Model – see Zillow) to school ratings to demographics/crime per area to points of interest, We also work with 100s of local MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and realtor associations nationally and aggregate active and sold properties as well. You get the picture. The most dramatic statement I can make is, if our servers and delivery went down you would see blank spaces and emptiness in hundreds of real estate and mortgage websites across the web.
On the SaaS side, we develop some of the most impressive websites, infographics, applications in real estate tech using our own real estate data.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
I absolutely believe San Diego and its surrounding areas are a great place to live, raise a family and start a new business. In regards to starting a business, sure there are negatives (state taxes, traffic getting worse) but the positives outweigh the negatives as you have great opportunities for business locations (brick and mortar) and the recruiting pool is constantly refreshed as it is a destination and military city. Great weather and reduced exposure to natural disasters allows for continuous operations with very little stoppages.
Contact Info:
- Address: 5580 La Jolla Blvd #608
- Website: www.homejunction.com
- Phone: 858.777.9533
- Email: help@homejunction.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/homejunction
- Twitter: https://www.facebook.com/homejunction
- Yelp: https://www.youtube.com/c/homejunctionsandiego
- Other: https://www.linkedin.com/company/home-junction-inc-/
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