Nevada company puts your next home a mouse click away

Tom Gardner

Sunday, March 5, 2000 | 10:11 a.m.

RENO, Nev. - You're in Los Angeles and you're transferring to Reno and have no clue where you're going to live.

Most of the time, it means days of driving around neighborhoods with a real estate agent in search of the home you just hope the rest of the family will find as perfect as you do.

Greg Costley has been there. But instead of enduring ongoing walkthroughs of rejects, he surfed the net. And, like the guy in the hair-loss commercial, he's not only a client. He runs the company.

Costley, who is chairman and chief executive officer of HomeSeekers.com, Inc., clicked onto the Reno-based site when he moved here from Southern California.

"We went through probably 80 houses or so. Our two teen-age daughters who were still at home were there telling us what they wanted to have. We culled it down to maybe 15 houses that we wanted to look at," he said.

His wife and their real estate agent toured some of those before Costley joined them.

"The first house we went through was the one we bought," he said.

HomeSeekers, which observes its second anniversary in July, was begun in Brea, Calif., just outside Los Angeles, by current President John Giamo. Greg Johnson added the technical operations in Minden and Doug Swanson of Reno contributed the telemarketing effort. Most of its 180 employees still work in Southern California.

Since its inception, it has built Web pages for more than 20,000 real estate brokers and now offers some 850,000 listings for home seekers that are updated daily - a feature Costley says makes his company unique in the Internet real estate business. Thousands more brokers use the company's software.

Homeseekers' own site received Forbes' "Best of the Web" designation in the magazine's current issue, which noted that house shoppers not only can search by price range and neighborhoods, but also can look for amenities like a wet bar, sauna or proximity to a golf course.

While HomeSeekers is a boon to buyers who can house hunt in their pajamas, Costley said the service makes brokers' jobs easier by bringing them clients who already have a neighborhood or even - like him - a specific house or two in mind.

"Our objective is to help agents be more able to be advisers rather than drivers, taxiing people around for a few days," he said.

John Reinhardt, president of Fillmore Real Estate Brooklyn, agrees. "Their Web site heightens our service to the customer by allowing us to serve in a more advisory role," he said.

HomeSeekers recently won a bidding war with its competitors to develop the Trump Corp. real estate group's Web site and has expanded its operations outside the United States to Europe, South America and Asia.

A month-old service launched along with the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals offers listings in Spanish. A French site is being developed through HomeSeekers' new partnership with ORPI, France's largest real estate organization.

A joint venture with Microsoft Corp. will use HomeSeeker's technology in developing brokers' Web pages on Microsoft's MSN Network.

"This announcement significantly changes the online real estate landscape," John Tuccillo said at the time. He is a former chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, which operates rival Web site REALTOR.com.

Costley sees the union with Bill Gates' empire as a reflection of his company's sophisticated software.

"Microsoft coming to us was not a major event for us. It was a major event for them," he said. "The linkage with Microsoft really was one that helped them as we provided them with our technology."

HomeSeekers' service is free to house-hunters. The company makes its money by hosting brokers' Web sites, selling software, conducting technology seminars and from sales to large organizations like Trump and advertising on its site. A Web site tailored to the specific broker ranges from about $700 to just under $1,000 a year.

Like its competitors and many other dot.com companies, profitability is in the future, although sales are strong and stock prices are holding their own.

HomeSeekers lost $3.5 million in the quarter that ended Dec. 31 and is some $10 million in the hole since the company's inception, Costley said. September-December revenue was $2.7 million, up from $1.4 million the previous quarter and $1 million a year earlier.

Shares are selling in the mid to upper teens on the NASDAQ Stock Market after a year that has seen prices peak at $25.50 and bottom out at $7.75.

Costley says the goal is to be operating in the black by the end of the July-September quarter.

"It is our feeling that we will be the first in our category to reach profitability," he said. "I am sure that there is going to be a group of companies - three or five or whatever the number may be - that will thrive and be ultimately very successful. Obviously, we intend to be one of that group."