One of the cheeky billboards for the Utah-based home buying company Homie along Interstate 15 in Sandy, Monday, Oct. 3, 2022. The company has suffered continuing layoffs and is fighting to stay relevant in a tough real estate market.“I made a lot of friends working there,” Ostebo said. “It was a good culture.”
Ostebo went from managing a team of six to spending the last year running the IT department alone. “I was very involved in all that stuff,” he said, “and so the numbers really hit me.”The company went from employing around 600 people to 130, and now, to likely around 40, multiple sources who asked to remain anonymous for fear of employment and legal repercussions told The Tribune. Those sources estimated that roughly 90 other employees were let go last month. .
A Homie listing in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 27, 2021. A critic argues that Utah startup Homie's model of flat-fee home sale transactions are not unique.In early marketing materials, Homie described itself as “a real estate technology company changing the way real estate is bought and sold by eliminating high fees and commissions.”
“June of 2020 we did almost 500 transactions, most of those sale side,” Peregrina said at the time. “We had market share north of 5% in Utah, which was crazy. And that carried us through the middle of 2021 and then that’s when things started changing. Every year we’ve been doubling revenue ever since.”Peregrina claimed on the podcast that revenue per unit increased, but as interest rates rose and first time homebuyers and sellers were priced out of the market in 2021, transactions decreased.
“Two things come to mind when I think about Homie,” said Mike DelPrete, a real estate tech strategist and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado Boulder. “One is: the business model is the same as any other real estate brokerage that’s been around for decades.”