London-based DotHomes is pitching itself as 'the Google of property search' - the latest site to build a niche service around the very lucrative property sector. Three venture firms were quick to pick up on the company's founders, Artemi Krymski and Douglas de Jager, with the Accelerator Group, Samos Investment and Arts Alliance all backing the 18-month old firm.
Today DotHomes is taking the ambitious leap into the US, expanding the site from the UK and South Africa to take on the market leader Realtor.com. The pair, along with three more engineers, believe that their full-text search and comprehensive indexing of rival property sites will make DotHomes a major player in property search.
Co-founder Douglas de Jager tells more.
DotHomes founders Douglas de Jager and Artemi Krymski
• Explain your business to my Mum. And in no more than 140 characters.
"It's a 'Google of real estate'. The DotHomes site allows home seekers to search thousands of real estate Websites from one place."
• How do you make money?
"We don't."
• What's your background?
"Artemi is a wizardly 24-year-old hacker from Russia. He single-handedly put together the first version of DotHomes, which was called Extate. He has particularly poor taste in music. And his favorite colour is pink.
"I'm South African, though have been in the UK for some fourteen years now, studying, studying, and studying a little bit more - culminating in PhD research into the mathematics of web search."
• How many users do you have now, and what's your target within 12 months?
"Less than Rightmove. Our 12-month target: 500,000 per month for our UK site, and 1m per month for our US site."
• What's the weirdest business experience you've had so far?
"Being invited by engineers at Google London to present on our search methodologies. Nerve-wracking and surreal. Particularly when Googlers were patched in by live video link from Trondheim, New York and Mountain View."
• What's your biggest challenge?
"Keeping the plants in our office alive. Deciding where to go for lunch. And, reaching our aim of having an uploaded video tour for every property in our search index."
• Who is your competition?
"Property search is still dominated by giant property portals - Rightmove in the UK and Realtor.com in the US. There are some new search sites which search over a selection of smaller portals (not the estate agent sites). But, we see these new sites as simply entrenching the portal model. We're looking to turn property search on its head, right across the globe."
• Where do you want the company to be in five years?
"We'd like DotHomes to be synonymous with real estate search, in the way that Google is with general search."
• Are you the next big thing?
"Well, in the UK, only RightMove has more links to property listings on estate agent websites. And, in South Africa, DotHomes now has the largest index of property listings. Much is currently happening within the vertical search space, and in real estate in particular. We certainly hope to be at the forefront of developments."
