BlueRoof, our First 100 Days - Part 2

                  

Usually when a business is formed, the people who create it spend some time putting together a business plan, raise some money and find people to work with. Then they put it all together. It usually takes a while from when they first begin thinking about starting a company to when they open for business.

With BlueRoof, our timeline looks much different. I decided to start a company around a website that was not even created yet. I thought about it for a week and gave my notice to Coldwell Banker (who always treated me very well and handled everything with grace) and was asked to stay on for a month while they found my replacement and not tell anyone that I would be leaving until we announced it. So although I had a month before I left, I was still managing an office of 110 agents and creating my website. Mike didn’t come on board until after I had launched the site and we actually became a brokerage.

We didn’t have angel funding or approach any VC’s because we didn’t want anybody telling us how to run our company. I have paid for everything, without any loans, which has been scary sometimes. Fortunately we have been profitable from the beginning.

At the beginning our model was more about price than anything. We knew we could offer people a better price than they were getting at other brokerages and with our technology we could operate for less. We have also been working on the concept of allowing people to find a home on their own and receive half the buyer agent commission. We’ve had that from the beginning, and so far we’ve been getting a couple a month. That is not our focus, like other companies around the country, but rather a small piece of what we do. If someone already knows of the house they want to buy, or they just want to find it on their own, without the help of a BlueRoof agent, we figure that’s a lot of work we didn’t have to put into it- so we’ll give that buyer half the money and still represent them throughout the transaction.

Until a week ago, we didn’t have a clear direction. We spent our first 90 days wandering through different ideas and tweaking our model a hundred times. Things that normally would happen before a company launched, we have been doing as we went along. Which, ultimately, I think has some advantages because we’ve been allowed to see the result as we make changes and improve our service and value model. We’ve been able to listen to our clients and we’ve heard from people who use our website and read this blog.

The last three months have shown me more stress than I have ever felt in my life. There have been nights I could not sleep or even sit down because I had so much anxiety. And there have been some amazing rewards. We’ve had clients write us letters and cards and emails that express such gratitude. We had one client name a room in their house the “BlueRoof Room” and we’ve made some good friends. And I’ve been brought back to center with my family and home and friends and the values and ideals that important to me.

During this time I’ve seen people act in ways that have surprised me. Some people I thought were friends have shown an ugliness I didn’t know they had, simply because our company was different then theirs. Other people whom I thought would be among our biggest critics have shown us a lot of support. You learn a lot about people by the way they say goodbye.

   

To date, the MLS shows we have listed 63 properties, have 30 current listings, and have closed 26 buyer-side sales (four made online). Add the 17 sales we have under contract and we have written 106 contracts, or about one a day. We have 13 people in the company and 11 who sell, which means we average about 10 deals/person during our first 100 or so days. Not bad for a start-up with no direction.

I’m grateful to have such a fun group of people to work with everyday. Our team is strong and talented. We move into our new office space next week and in a few weeks we’ll be starting a new marketing campaign around our company vision and we’ll begin bringing some fine people into our organization. We’re all pretty excited right now.

Thank you to all of the industry people and friends who have been so supportive. Here’s looking forward to us all having a ton of success during the next 100 days!

BlueRoof, Our First 100 Days - Part 1

    

When we first opened as a brokerage at the end of July we knew this would be a ride, but it’s been even crazier than expected. We’ve had a lot of fun and a lot of stress, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

BlueRoof began by accident, really. I had decided to do a re-design of a website that I’ve had for a few years, but after meeting with my web-developer and seeing some mock-ups I decided I would build a new website altogether. So I did a ton of research on names and logos and everything else and put together the plan for what I believed would be the very best real estate website possible. I figured if I was going to spend my time and resources, I’d go all the way with it. Whether it actually became the best real estate site or not it would, at least, be my favorite.

As the website starting to come together and I thought more about it I considered starting my own company. I had always wanted to. And I was always complaining that I could do things better. So why not see what I could do? The timing was right with the consumer begging for change and the local real estate market booming. I discussed it with my wife and a close friend and decided to do it. I approached Mike Shehan, who was the Director of Marketing for Prudential Utah (and by far the best marketing person in the business) and asked him to be a partner. Mike had owned his own company before and has a good business mind. Mike also has a lot of strengths where I don’t, so I thought it would be a great fit. Luckily for me, he agreed to come on board.

    

Building a good company from the ground up is tough, but with the demands of launching a major website, BlueRoof.com, and the fact that our business model is challenging the traditional real estate establishment- well, it’s been interesting.

Before we launched, I had already began to get to know some pretty innovative people in the industry. I had been in contact, through blogging with Spencer Rascoff, Zillow’s CFO before they launched and I was one of the people searching for clues about what they were doing, which led me to a bunch of other innovative websites and companies. At the end of May I attended the TechCrunch party in Seattle, co-hosted by Redfin and met Eric Heller and Glenn Kelman and some other Redfin and Microsoft guys that let me pick their brains.

Right after we became a brokerage we attended the Inman Connect convention in San Francisco July 26-28. We went to the convention to accomplish three things;

-Get the BlueRoof name out in the industry

-Discover and Learn

-Have a Blast/Meet Fun People

And we had huge successes with all three. The first hour of the first day we attended Michael Harrington’s opening address about the state of the industry, where he described how the industry needs to change because it is broken and where he thinks the industry needs to go. We were listening and realized that he was describing our business model. One of the things he talked about was how the MLS’s are too controlling with the information and there should be a place where people can see all listed homes AND For Sale By Owner (FSBO) homes at the same time. BlueRoof.com had this. So I stood up and announced that we had every listing from every brokerage and FSBO homes on our website and you could search for them and see the results together. He asked how we did that when the MLS would not allow it and I replied that we just did it. A few minutes of back and forth and a woman toward the front of the audience stands up and says she is with the local MLS and we weren’t allowed to do that. It was a beautiful moment. Everyone held their breath or laughed, laptops were opening our homepage throughout the room and now we were given a villain to make us look even better.

So after that first meeting people were talking about what happened and about BlueRoof all week. People were coming up to us and telling us how great it was that we were doing what we were doing. They would ask us about our company and we would over-hear people discussing it- it was great.

We went to the convention booths and found some great technologies. Some we have implemented into our business and some we will implement, and then some didn’t work for us, but it’s good to see the “new stuff” anyway.

Mike’s girlfriend flew into town and with my wife we met a bunch of people and had a lot of fun going out (very late) every night and playing around in the city. We drove out to wine country and ate at some great local restaurants and enjoyed our time quite a lot.

It was a great trip for us. When we got back home our work was about to begin…