Homie disrupting industry, pleasing customers
Homie is changing the way homebuyers and sellers connect. From left to right: Mike Trionfo, co-founder and CTO; Johnny Hanna, co-founder and CEO; and Mike Peregrina, co-founder and CFO.
The Saratoga Springs townhome Brian Messmer sold in 2015 through Homie.
Brian Messmer and his wife used Homie to sell their Saratoga Springs home.
When Brian Messmer and his wife decided to sell their Saratoga Springs home in 2015, they knew they didn’t want to use a real estate agent.
“It was the commission. It was just money out of my pocket before anything ever got done,” Messmer said.
Messmer decided to sell the home on his own through KSL classifieds.
“We thought it would be easy to sell it on our own, because it was vacant and ready to move in,” Messmer said. After about three months, the Messmers decided that route wasn’t working. “We had a lot of people call who wanted to sell our home, but not a lot of people interested in buying it.”
Messmer still didn’t want to pay an agent commission, so he opted for a fairly new option at the time — Homie. Homie is a company based in Draper that uses software technology to automate the home buying and selling industry. Homie sellers are charged a flat rate, about $900, and receive many of the same services they pay thousands more for when using an agent.
At the time Messmer signed up for Homie, it was in its beta form, and the platform wasn’t as fully developed as it is today. But they still found it to be just what they needed. Within just two months, their home sold.
“We were very new to the process of selling a home, but they made it pretty easy to find people that wanted to see our home,” he said. “The best part of it was they were really good about letting me know about the process. I would’ve wasted a lot more time with people who weren’t interested, or agents’ calls who wanted to sell it. It made it all simple.”
That’s the goal, according to Homie CEO Johnny Hanna. He and fellow co-founders Mike Trionfo and Mike Peregrina all felt the real estate industry was ripe for disruption.
“I’m not anti-agent,” Hanna explained. He just felt, with the technology already out there that gives today’s homeowners the ability to search for a home on their own, the very, very old processes in the real estate industry as a whole needed to change and adapt as well.
“Now all homes are public, and most people are finding their own homes through the internet. That’s where we come in,” he said.
Hanna and his team figured that because most homeowners are searching for new spaces online and vetting their choices before even heading out the door to tour a home, Homie could step in to “act as their agent” for the paperwork and legal steps. Homie is able to do this at such a low flat rate because of the company’s powerful software platform that organizes and automates the process.
“That’s what it takes to sell a home regardless of the size or price of the home,” Hanna said.
That isn’t to say there are not actual people behind the algorithms. After just two years in business, Homie already employs 60 people, and is still growing. Those numbers include licensed agents and real estate attorneys, who can answer Homie clients’ questions and concerns along the way.
Hanna and his team aren’t done innovating yet, either. Hanna and Trionfo were both co-founders at Entrata together, the company that automated the apartment rental payment and management industry. They plan to do something very similar with real estate, and are still building and perfecting the tech to do so.
“Our actual vision is to automate the whole process — from buying and selling to securing a mortgage to moving it through title and escrow,” Hanna said. “Eventually the whole process will be peer-to-peer, buyer to seller.”
Hanna said Homie has endured some hard pushback from local real estate agents. The average Homie seller has saved about $10,000 in commissions, money that would normally go to an agent. Homie recently became the second-largest brokerage in the state of Utah, and captured 7 percent of Utah County home listings last month.
Hanna feels this move is needed, similar to how Uber disrupted the taxi industry.
“It’s the natural evolution for every industry. And our business model is here to stay,” Hanna said.
As for Messmer, he is now settled with his wife and three children in Orem, and expects to live in that home for a very long time. But if they eventually needed to sell, he said he would definitely opt for Homie again.