‘Zoom’ meets boom in real estate
Co-founders of tech start-up Home Live, Luke Watson and Jon Tyson, are keen to take the site global.
Luke Watson struggles to recall a time when technology wasn’t an obsession. At 15 he was paid to build his first website, a year later he established a small business teaching high-school mums how to send emails and, in 2000, he launched his first start-up, enabling SMS messages to be sent between different mobile networks.
“Both my parents started their own businesses when they were young,” Watson says. “So it always seemed pretty natural for me to try to start one of my own, based on an idea or a compelling concept.”
In true entrepreneurial style, Watson dropped out of university to pursue an early career in Silicon Valley, where he stayed for almost five years before returning to Australia to launch his own tech start-up.
It was in Sydney, while doing software development, that Watson met his future business partner, Jon Tyson, then chief technology officer at Pollenizer, a tech consultancy designed to help fledgling start-ups find their feet. The pair soon began a long-term collaboration.
“We just started talking about interesting technical challenges, bouncing ideas off each other and thinking about where we could identify a gap or an opportunity,” Watson says.
After some early wins, Watson and Tyson launched Home Live, a real estate live-streaming platform allowing people to virtually attend home inspections from anywhere in the world.
“It’s effectively Zoom for real estate,” the co-founders explain.
Launched in 2019, the platform enables prospective buyers and renters to register for scheduled live-streams and attend them through the Home Live Australia website, mobile apps, or via a growing number of agency websites and portals supported by the company’s “smart embedding” technology.
Designed as an infrastructure provider to engage buyers, agents, renters and property managers alike, Home Live allows viewers to ask agents questions, as well as instruct them to open cupboards or test fittings, just as they would in a normal inspection.
The duo say the experience of a physical property inspection has not kept pace with other industry innovations.
“Technology has facilitated a steady march of convenience and accessibility,” Watson says. “But it’s almost like real estate has lagged behind a little.
“If you think about the journey that people go on to find a property, they generally go online, find photos, maybe a prerecorded video, a description of that property and will then typically go and inspect a property.”
It was in this space the pair spotted an opportunity to build a start-up that could provide a platform to engage people remotely and in real time.
The impact of the pandemic fast-tracked the expansion of the business and Home Live now carries more than 250,000 virtually enabled properties.
Says Watson: “I think what happened is that a lot of the trends we were already seeing in real estate simply sped up during COVID-19.”
Market conditions during the pandemic “accelerated the user shift to live-streamed property inspections”.
Recent research undertaken by Home Live suggests 79 per cent of vendors would request a live-stream inspection if it were available, with a further 81 per cent saying they would attend a live-stream viewing if it were offered to them.
The surge in property has also spiked demand, with the platform seeing more and more “urban dwellers wanting to live-stream inspections of properties in regional areas”.
“We’re hearing a lot of agents say we can get a property listed on a Monday and have contracts signed by Thursday,” says Watson. “That’s an exceptional market for us to be part of.
“Even though COVID-19 has caused everyone to shut themselves in for a period, it’s also highlighted the mobility we have in working remotely, as well as an increased desire for more space. It’s promoted a lot of domestic movement between NSW, Victoria and Queensland.”
As Home Live continues to expand, it has attracted more talent and, crucially, more investment. This month the tech pioneers secured $2.5m in investor funding, which will help them launch in the US.