Matthew Barba
Title: Co-founder, Placester.com
Age: 27
Experience: Seven in real estate, three at Placester
As a freshman in college searching for his first apartment, Matt Barba took one look at his real estate agent and decided he wanted in. After working as an agent for several years – and becoming frustrated with the hassles involved in creating his own web marketing – he and his partner, startup vet Fred Townes, co-founded Placester.com, a new company designed to make it easy for real estate agents to create branded websites and other marketing tools. The company has already raised several million dollars in seed capital from investors, announcing $5.5 million infusion in April for a new real estate ad product.
Q: So I understand you were an agent yourself before founding Placester?
A: I worked for Modern Real Estate in Allston. I went to school at BU, and while I was getting my degree in finance, I decided to move off campus freshman year. I met an agent – he was actually the managing agent of Modern at the time – and I just kind of fell in love with it. The work he was doing was interesting, and I thought it was so cool how he could pick out a handful of listings and in one afternoon’s work make, admittedly, a bunch of money – as a college student, what I cared about was paying the bills. So I ended up joining Modern [as an agent] a few months after getting my place.
Q: What was the core problem that led you to found Placester?
A: It was the strangest thing to me, when I became an agent … I go into the office the day [after passing my licensing exam] and my boss sits me down and says, “Okay. Here’s your computer, and good luck.” And I was sort of like … well, wait, where are the people that I’m going to help rent apartments? And he said, “You gotta go find them.” As a real estate professional, you spend 70 to 80 percent of your time marketing, and when I figured out what it really took to market yourself effectively online … if I wanted to create a website, it was very hard, if I wanted to automate my marketing, it was very hard.
There’s this whole digital mindset that consumers are in today, they go to Google, they go to Netflix, they go to Facebook, where information is at their fingertips. Real estate wasn’t like that. It was hard to search, information was often inaccurate or out of date, and it was a constant point of friction with my clients. There’s a very hard technology problem there, and it’s not the agent’s fault. They want to be good at it – they want to be great at online marketing, it’s what they have to do. But the technology wasn’t there to support them, and that’s what we wanted to solve. Consumers base their trust on how agents look on the web, and we want that to be a wonderful experience. And inexpensive.
Q: Placester recently announced a deal with several Hearst publications to produce real estate advertising for the websites of their local papers. What’s the thinking behind that? It seems like real estate agents have spent the past decade being weaned off newspaper ads.
A: We had so many agents setting up sites, and [they were asking us], “What do I do next? There’s all these leads out there, how do I get them?” For Placester, that’s not a service we provide – we don’t do [search engine optimization] or custom websites – we provide a product and teach people how to use that product. But what we found was, real estate professionals really only had a handful of options when it came to advertising online. They had the kind of standard destination sites, but most of our customers really didn’t feel very comfortable advertising with local media. And we started digging into that to ask why. The experience on real estate sections of local media is not great, it just doesn’t really compare to the big portals.
So about nine months ago, we started this project, looking to see how we could improve that experience so that our customers would not only feel comfortable enough to advertise, and that is where it came from. If you’re a real estate professional in San Francisco, and the San Francisco Chronicle has a wonderful readership coming there every day to get their news, if they experience this real estate section that’s fast, and mobile friendly and – in my personal opinion – rivals the experience you get on the national portal sites, then you’re giving agents in San Francisco another option of where to advertise, and we think that’s incredibly powerful. Because there’s all these places that local audiences exist, and we want to open them up to real estate professionals. Competition is really, really healthy.
Top Five Tips For Effective Web Marketing:
- Engage in your community, digitally and in person.
- Make sure your online presence represents you – your expertise, your interests, not just your headshot and contact info.
- A website is more than a one-time investment. Find a way to keep adding fresh info, even just bite-sized updates.
- If you’re going to commit to the web, commit. It takes both time and money to succeed, though one can sub for the other.
- Remember to educate yourself. Keep your skills fresh to make sure you’re aiming where your audience is, as things change fast on the web.
