“Home” is something we all have in common, whether we’re looking for one, or building one. We base our lives around our homes, and it’s the little details in those surroundings that make all the difference. That’s why shopping for a home online is such a time-consuming exercise, according to Homezilla founder and CEO Sandy Ward: people put a lot of thought into searching for the right place to live. In fact, Sandy knows exactly what kinds of thoughts people have when running their searches. And some of them might surprise you.

The Cape Breton native started Homezilla after four years as a manager at Yahoo. “At Yahoo, you’ve got millions of users coming to the website every day,” says Ward. “And they produce a lot of data. And in that data, there’s power.” The transition to the real estate market seemed natural, given the wide interest and possibility of capitalizing on that.  But it all boiled down to peoples’ experience in searching for homes. “One day over brunch, my friend says to me, ‘I spent six hours yesterday looking for the nearest dog parks located near each of the houses I’m looking to buy.’ And it occurred to me that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of people, every hour, doing the exact same thing, and that there has to be a way to make that process easier.”

And thus, Homezilla was born. After a few years perfecting their data-gathering and sorting processes, things are looking up for the young company: a recent partnership with the publishing and printing concern Transcontinental guarantees a wide awareness of their services. Robert Redshaw of the Cape Breton Post isn’t shy about singing Homezilla’s praises: “Bringing 90% of Cape Breton listings online and into print is very exciting for us. The Cape Breton Post website has 40% of our visitors from outside of Cape Breton ; most ex-pats want to own a piece of CB and now they will easily be able to see all the latest waterfront for sale. HomeZilla's customer-first focus and their ties to Cape Breton made partnering with them very easy.”

ECC’s Alex Willis spoke with Sandy Ward just before the launch of the Transcontinental deal, in the spring of 2011.

Alex Willis: Your business deals with the real estate market across Canada, but you have strong roots in Atlantic Canada. Tell our readers about your background in Atlantic Canada.

Sandy Ward: I’m from Cape Breton. I did the first few years of my computer science degree at Cape Breton University, and then went to Dalhousie to finish that degree.

AW: Your business partners are still located in Atlantic Canada?

SW: Yes, all the key players are in Nova Scotia. I’m the only full-time member living outside the region.

AW: One of the East Coast Connected mandates is regional cooperation, and inter-regional investment. Does it work to your advantage to have that kind of geographical split in your business?

SW: It did for us. Because I was from Nova Scotia, getting introductions to people in the real estate industry there was a lot easier. They’re getting a lot of calls from the US out there, and knowing the area, I could call them and say, “I know a way to diffuse the concerns some of these clients have about being in the Maritimes.” So, being spread out and knowing the other areas’ concerns and desires, can be a big help.

AW: Is most of your income from advertising?

SW: Most of our revenue actually comes from data-related products. At the end of the day we’re a website that collects search-related information – data on how people research an area. We package that data up and sell it to mortgage-related companies, real estate companies, brokerage companies. One of our big launches coming up is through Transcontinental newspapers, who own 26 newspapers around Atlantic Canada, and we have other partners around the country also.

AW: There’s obviously great interest for that data in Canada. Are there any signs of interest from outside the country?

SW: The research community is very interested. We’re actually working with Dalhousie University, and we’ve got professors, PhDs, and Masters students “looking to find gold in the straw,” as it were – to make the kinds of data we collect more valuable.

AW: So describe what “gold” means, if most of the data is “straw.”

SW: “Gold” would be being able to detect when a user on our website is more likely able to generate real-estate revenue. So we have, say, 7,000 unique users per day. Of those, a certain number will get in touch with realtors through the site. We want to know who those people are, and how they came to the decision to fill out the form to contact the realtors. A good analogy would be, as a real estate agent, when you hold an open house, you can tell right away if a person is serious or not about buying. Our technology will fill a similar role, except for people who are looking on their websites.

AW: You use StatsCan data to generate some of Homezilla’s information for yourself. What’s the story going forward with that, with all the changes to StatsCan models?

SW: There are replacements for that data, and we may even be able to find better data, to be honest. The problem is, the price is quite a bit higher. So it’s a question of cost control for us.

AW: In a recent interview, you mentioned you used both Vancouver and Nova Scotia as “test locations” for adding information to your site. That’s a pretty big gap in the scale of markets. What was the outcome of the study?

SW: Actually, if you think about all of Nova Scotia, and then Vancouver, they’re actually quite similar in scale in the aggregate. Nova Scotia has anything on offer between $3,000 to $350,000 – but if you look at the core of Vancouver, you’ve got just under a million people, but with a significantly higher average real estate value, and distinct neighbourhoods like West Vancouver, which we can break down by geographic location. All told, it gives us a good idea about how the coasts each work, but also should help us model the distribution in the center of the country as well.

AW: What’s the most searched-for feature or location on your engine? You’ve mentioned schools are the most common landmark people look for. What are some others?

SW: Liquor stores.

AW: Really?

SW: Yep. And nobody wants to ask that at an open house: “Where’s the nearest liquor store?” But it’s something that a lot of us use on a regular basis, and depending on where you are in a province, it can sometimes be quite far away. So people are very interested in where they are in relation to that kind of landmark.

After that, it’s religious institutions.

AW: [laughs] You’re kidding me. That search comes after liquor stores?

SW: Yes. It gives us some insight into how people do searches, though: they don’t necessarily want to ask these questions to a realtor in person, but these locations have similar value in a search.

AW: What’s the real estate market like in Atlantic Canada, based on visits to your site?

SW: It really varies across the Atlantic provinces. There’s a growing gap between the urban and the rural in that area. From market to market you see huge swings between cities and rural zones, far larger than you would in a lot of other provinces – compared to say, Toronto, where prices don’t fluctuate as much because the core of the city is spread out much farther.

AW: Are you monitoring any trends through your site? How do you do that?

SW: Yes, we do. Toronto’s an easy place to measure the ebb and flow of trends. It’s also fun to see when a few well-known houses, which haven’t been on the market for 30 years, go on sale: you get a ton of searches all at once.

AW: Tell us about the launch with Transcontinental.

SW: They’re one of the largest publishers and printing firms in North America. About a year ago, I was in Halifax for meetings with Dalhousie, and I ran into a Transcontinental guy with the real estate market in his portfolio. We went out for coffee, and he loved the fact that we had a good focus on Nova Scotia, and that Transcon had a presence in the real estate market in the province. We spun out the relationship at that point, and with the support of the people at the Cape Breton Post – they’ve been behind us since Day 1 – we’ve been progressing ever since.

So Transcon has done a lead-up of ads moving towards the launch, and they sold out 70% of their ad inventory in the first two days of sales. So that was a vote of confidence. I think they sensed that we were passionate about the community, which is a very important factor on the East Coast – when something is done well there, it’s always community-focused. Transcon’s website gets a ton of traffic, but they still want to partner with people who share their community vision.

AW: What’s next for Homezilla?

SW: Getting ready for further launches with Transcontinental: the Truro Daily News, the New Glasgow News, and the Cape Breton Post. And later in the spring, we’ve got some exciting developments in partnership with Dalhousie University.