Sometimes less is more. While many home buying real estate portals have become somewhat cluttered, HomeFinder.com has been focused on giving consumers a user-friendly experience to help make their home buying process as pain-free and efficient as possible. ATTOM Data Solutions is helping with that effort.
The iconic website, HomeFinder.com has been in the game since 1997 when it was originally called Homescape.com, giving HomeFinder the designation of being the longest surviving real estate portal in the country. The company was purchased by newspaper conglomerate, Classified Ventures, 10 years ago, who used the site to power all their newspapers’ real estate websites.
In 2017, entrepreneur, Mike Sawtell, purchased HomeFinder from Placester, a real estate marketing company. Over the last 3 years, he and his team have been busy transitioning the popular 20-year-old legacy website to a modern, cloud-hosted, mobile first, web portal featuring extremely fast loading pages.
“Our company has been focused on making sure HomeFinder continues to be very relevant as a search portal for all consumers looking for their next home. The latest version of HomeFinder 2.0, which has been rebuilt from the ground up, focuses on ease of use while providing timely, relevant property data that will empower consumers to make sound buying decisions,” said Mike Sawtell, CEO of HomeFinder.
In partnering with ATTOM, the CEO said HomeFinder is utilizing additional quality data to give even more information to consumers about a particular neighborhood and home they’re considering. In January of 2020, the company just completed adding 100 million off-market properties to their searchability.
HomeFinder has built all new pages for the 100M off-market properties; where most of the data comes directly from ATTOM. The company is also using ATTOM’s automated valuation model (AVM) and a vast set of ATTOM’s property data and local information.
Sawtell added that the site offers a simple, modern user interface, a new page layout while being hosted in the cloud. With Progressive Web App (PWA) front end technologies, consumers will enjoy a site that loads very quickly.
But most importantly, the CEO takes pride in the fact that the consumer-focused portal is easy to use. “We accentuated the simplicity of use instead of making it complicated,” said Sawtell, HomeFinder has always had the reputation of being a consumer-friendly real estate portal, we still have many more features to add in 2020, but we will always emphasize ease of use and honor the legacy of the HomeFinder brand.”
