realestatenews

Matthew Slutsky co-founder of real estate new site & resource BuzzBuzzHome shares with us their 2017 plans to allow buyers to purchase pre-construction condos online with their credit cards. BuzzBuzzHome covers real estate and developments across many cities including Toronto, New York, Miami. Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and more.   Transcript Davelle:                             On today’s episode we have Matthew Slutsky, co-founder and president of BuzzBuzzHome Corp. Welcome to the show Matthew, can you tell our listeners a little bit about BuzzBuzzHome? Matthew Slutsky:            Yeah, for sure, thanks for having me on the show. BuzzBuzzHome is North America’s largest on-line listing of all new residential developments. Basically, we’re like MLS but only for new construction so new condos, new town homes, new sub-divisions and essentially that’s what we do where BuzzBuzzHome is a listing of everything new in the marketplace. Davelle:                             Cool, but you obviously have a cool news aspect of it as well too because that’s certainly that’s one of the reasons why I go to your site quite regularly is to read the interesting articles you’ve got about real estate. Matthew Slutsky:            Yep, so we’ve got a great new site it’s at news.buzzbuzzhome.com, we have a team of about eight reporters on it and their goal is to report not just on new construction but on real estate, on tech, what’s going on in the real estate world, and really to be a kind of a [all out 00:01:34] leader and a news provider of real estate and what’s happening, it’s a great resource, people love it. Davelle:                             Cool and I mean one of the things I’ve noticed is you guys have certainly been expanding into a number of different cities. Which cities are you in now? Matthew Slutsky:            So, we started out in downtown Toronto, and my background’s land development and we kind of got our toes wet in downtown Toronto, that was about six years ago, we expanded across Ontario, we started getting calls from builders in Vancouver saying that what we’re doing is really lacking in the Vancouver marketplace so we opened up an office there and sort of take over the Vancouver market. Then we started filling in between Ontario and Vancouver and started going all the way down to both oceans and about three years ago we started expanding into the US, so we opened up an office in New York and we now are across all of Canada, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, San Diego, Florida, Texas, I think we’re in about 10 major US regions. Davelle:                             Geez, that’s amazing, it sounds like you’re about to take over the world, what’s next? Matthew Slutsky:            That’s our plan, world domination is our plan, you know the reality is that new construction has been kind of a forgotten aspect on-line worldwide. There are a few players in … Some in Russia, some in Australia but generally speaking that there really is no great … India actually has some really good ones as well, but there is no dominant global player listing all new residential construction. Typically on the real estate side companies that try and enter the market go after where the commission is, so they go after the resale side first and from resale they might start looking into rental but very rarely do they actually enter on the new construction side. So it’s a niche that we found and have started to grow and ultimately we would like to be across the world, right now we’re pushing through the United States and we’re starting to launch a bunch of really cool new projects as well. Davelle:                             Awesome, that sounds great. Now how did you get the idea to start BuzzBuzzHome? Matthew Slutsky:            I was in land development, my background is real estate and development, I did my undergraduate in urban studies at UofT, I did masters of science in University of Edinburgh both with a land development twist to them so obviously I wanted to be a builder. I worked for a company called Atria and worked my way up there then moved over to Diamante and worked my way up to VP of development at Diamante which is a luxury condo builder in the city and I just noticed this huge gap. I noticed, you know, we were spending a fortune on print ads, signage, A-frames, yet we had a pretty awful website and the more I looked around most builders had an awful website yet I was starting to see the market change in that purchasers were starting their search on-line. Not only were they starting their search on-line but they really felt entitled to information and at the time most builders were reluctant to release any information. The kind of typical sales strategy was give them as little information as possible and try and lure them into the sales center. Once they’re in the sales center, still don’t give them any information and listen to what their needs are and have the sales agent show them kind of one or two best plans that fit their needs. We were starting to see that the purchasers weren’t interested in that, they wanted to go on-line and they wanted to get all the information possible on-line. So, I left Diamante and started what’s become BuzzBuzzHome, I started with my partner Cliff Peskin, he was running a company called Nutrition in Motion, which he ended up selling to a US company. He had a great kind of … Built a great technical background or he led the team that built a great technical background in that company, so we partnered up and launched what’s become BuzzBuzzHome. Davelle:                             Cool, that sounds awesome. Where will you take your brand next, what’s next for BuzzBuzzHome? Matthew Slutsky:            So we’re working on … We’ve got quite a few projects on the go right now, our most interesting is what we call BuyNow and essentially BuzzBuzzHome currently in it’s current state is a discovery site