Peak Ventures announced on Tuesday an investment in Salt Lake City-based peer-to-peer real estate marketplace, Homie.
Homie offers a platform that allows buyers, builders, and sellers of homes to meet, negotiate, and transact without a middleman or high commission fees. When buyers and sellers use Homie, they save tens of thousands of dollars in commission fees compared to using traditional real estate agents.
Jeff Burningham, founding and managing partner at Peak Ventures, stated:
“The Homie platform takes a whole new approach to how people buy and sell homes. We are excited to be backing the Homie team who come with years of experience in the real estate technology space that they can use to solve this big problem.”
Homie CEO Johnny Hanna, explained:
“We feel like several factors are coming together to make it possible to launch Homie right now. If you look at the success of companies like Uber and Airbnb, you see that consumer behavior is shifting towards on-demand services in a shared-economy model. Real estate is one of the last big markets that hasn’t really changed in decades. Our goal with Homie is to do just that by creating a seamless experience that allows people to find, buy, and sell homes without an agent, saving thousands of dollars in commission fees.”
The Homie founders have already attracted additional key team members who have bought into the founders’ vision for the company. Additional team members include Dan Might, VP of Operations, who was a general manager for Uber, founder of Holodeck, CEO of HRworX and ran operations for Coors Brewing Company and Dave Bascom, VP of Marketing, who was the founder and former CEO of SEO.com and CEO of digital marketing agency, Fit Marketing. Several veteran developers and designers have recently joined the Homie team, bringing total company headcount to 13.
Hanna added:
“I’ve known the team at Peak for a long time and really respect what they’ve accomplished with their other companies. we share similar values, which makes it a great fit for us. This investment shows they have confidence that this team can accomplish our goal of changing the way people buy and sell homes.”
