HomeZilla launced today. HomeZilla is a research assistant for researching and buying a home. It is not a real estate site like Realtor.ca or ZooCasa which are focused on listing houses for sale (read more about Realtor.ca and ZooCasa on BlogTO). HomeZilla is similar but very different, it tries to help home buyers connect with the 95% non-commercial information about their potential neighbourhood including information about:
- 99% of all public Canadian schools
- Over 1000 fire stations across Canada
- Demographics like average age, median income, etc
- Rail transit in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, and Montreal
- Over 800 liquor stores from across Canada
The services is aimed at helping potential home buyers answer questions such as:
- Where is the closest school, subway, bakery, dog park, etc.?
- What is the average price for homes in this area?
- How much money do people in this neighbourhood make?
It will be interesting to see if Sandy and the team can develop a business model that does not primarily rely on impressions to drive revenue (read Don Dodge’s post on advertising business models). CPM models require a huge number of visitors to drive revenue. There’s a business in market segmentation and targeted advertising. Figuring out a series of business development partnerships with other complimentary local players (ZooCasa, BlogTO, OurFaves, PlanetEye, among others) is a good starting point to help drive some traffic and driving up targeted advertising revenue. Where I could see a very strong partnership is an integration with the ranking and local reputation system being built by GigPark.