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. .
Now with just a sliver of its original work force, and a plan to keep its low fees while offering a “full-service brokerage,” Homie may be faced with determining its ability to survive at all. In an interview on the “Meat and Potatoes” podcast, Homie co-founder Mike Peregrina explained that indeed, 2020 was a good year for business. As it was for all of the home sales market.
A home listed by Salt Lake City-based Homie in West Valley City, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022. A current employee told The Tribune that Homie has changed from a ‘do it yourself’ option to a full-service brokerage without all the cost and hassle."Real estate brokers and academics are fierce critics of prop-tech businesses like Homie and question their viability in less robust markets.
DelPrete said despite the hype, there have been few real innovations in real estate aside from electronic signatures and Zillow’s “zestimate” which allowed anyone to see the value of a home and online listings. This “democratized” a previously closed ecosystem.
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